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Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

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Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#51

Post by thwayunion »

User23 wrote: post #44
thwayunion wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why will academic R&D begin falling below the rate of inflation? Debt-to-GDP ratios and the cost of servicing existing debt together mean that there are difficult budgeting decisions on the horizon for many western governments. Academic R&D just doesn't have the constituency needed to save it from cuts. I will be a bit astounded if NSF/NIH don't take nominal cuts during the debt ceiling negotiations, and they certa…

> Debt-to-GDP ratios and the cost of servicing existing debt together mean that there are difficult budgeting decisions on the horizon for many western governments That's not at all how modern money and economics work. There is no transfer mechanism from Debt:GDP to economic productivity. That's not to say that a sovereign currency issuing government can't shoot itself in the foot any number of ways of course.

It's definitely how the US Congress works, which is really the only relevant consideration since the purse strings are controlled by Congress. Debt servicing costs and the cost of new debt have a direct impact on spending levels via the debt ceiling, which is controlled by Congress.

On an unrelated note, I'm not sure what modern money theories you're referring to, but the theories which purported that we didn't have to worry about inflation seem to be... slightly more out of favor than they were 1-2 years ago.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#52

Post by bumby »

kneebonian wrote: post #46
bbor wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If academia had a better effort/reward ratio pre-“X-level”, wouldn’t society reap the benefits of increased interest in those careers?

Well I mean Einstein, Netwon, Maxwell, and Galileo were probably more valuable to advancing our understanding of physics than every one of their contemporaries combined. The funny part is that Einstein wasn't even in academia until after he was famous. If anything this speaks to me that we want only those people in the field who would do it even if there was no reward for they will be the ones who produce earth shatt…

I agree, but it seems like a lot of modern research requires resources that make it difficult for independent people to contribute.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#53

Post by epicureanideal »

bumby wrote: post #31
photochemsyn wrote: post #19

Back when I was in grad school there was a whole set of research people who just lived at the university - but I noticed, they'd didn't really do a whole lot of work. They were just always there, always on hand when the tenured PI showed up to be noticed, and so on. They'd mastered the art of appearing to be dogged 24-7 nose-to-the-grindstone researchers, but it was really just a relaxed little club. Most of their en…

> rather than into doing groundbreaking innovative research. We probably should first acknowledge that the vast majority of research is incremental and not groundbreaking. > not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about Depending on your interest, this may be a case of expectation management. We should expect that the idea that one can eat your cake and have it too is a rare case.…

> We probably should first acknowledge that the vast majority of research is incremental and not groundbreaking.

The way we fund research heavily skews the research attempted so that that's even more the case than it otherwise would be.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#54

Post by Swizec »

monsieurbanana wrote: post #34
xyzelement wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. We can also surmise that lack of hard work is guaranteed to not work. So if you need to grow hard work seems like the better option.

Lack of hard work definitely isn't an hindrance for grow. Having the right family name, pleasant facial structure or just being very likeable and sociable are all possible replacements for hard work.

Those things give you opportunities. You still have to take them.

Turbo boost does nothing if the engine is off.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#55

Post by ProjectArcturis »

Ultimatt wrote: post #29
photochemsyn wrote: post #19

Back when I was in grad school there was a whole set of research people who just lived at the university - but I noticed, they'd didn't really do a whole lot of work. They were just always there, always on hand when the tenured PI showed up to be noticed, and so on. They'd mastered the art of appearing to be dogged 24-7 nose-to-the-grindstone researchers, but it was really just a relaxed little club. Most of their en…

Plenty of research doesn't need millions to do. If you're a mathematician or almost any kind of theoretician or computational scientist you need a laptop maybe the odd bit of cloud time on a bigger blob of compute, in the case of mathematicians you might need chalk. The millions you do need to spend though are on private per-paper viewing of literature, thats the real mind killer. If universities just had alumni acce…

There is, of course, sci-hub, if your morality aligns with that.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#56

Post by thwayunion »

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #47
Ultimatt wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of research doesn't need millions to do. If you're a mathematician or almost any kind of theoretician or computational scientist you need a laptop maybe the odd bit of cloud time on a bigger blob of compute, in the case of mathematicians you might need chalk. The millions you do need to spend though are on private per-paper viewing of literature, thats the real mind killer. If universities just had alumni acce…

You're forgetting the cost of funding students, but also there are costs in securing prestige for your institution. The university benefits when your grants are large and plentiful, so they encourage research faculty to pursue those projects which earn more money, even if it's not exactly what they care most about.

> You're forgetting the cost of funding students, but also there are costs in securing prestige for your institution.

But why does he need students to do his own research?

I made a similar calculation and went into industry. I am now at the point where I could self-fund an indefinite post-doc (with benefits) at the risk-free rate of return. By the time I would be going up for Full Professor, I'll be able to self-fund an equivalent salary -- again, at the risk-free rate. And I don't have to worry about the inevitable layoffs coming to higher-ed, tenure be damned. And I can do my Science from a ski slope or a beach instead of from some random rural town.

If you want to do Science, just spend 1-2 decades in industry and save your money. If you want to lead "The $LASTNAME Lab" at "Famous University" where you have "X PhD students" and "Y post-docs", then you're going to pay for the silly prestige game by giving up actually doing Science for the rest of your life.

The situation may be different for people who need wet labs, but in Math and CS here's just no reason to bust your ass to get tenure. Just bust your ass in industry instead. You'll be working for The Man instead of doing what you really want either way, I promise, and honestly industry often has more interesting problems than whatever happens to be of interest to whichever person was willing to live in an expensive boring place on a small salary while shoving their ideas into the Heilmeier Catechism.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#57

Post by _yb2s »

photochemsyn wrote: post #19

Back when I was in grad school there was a whole set of research people who just lived at the university - but I noticed, they'd didn't really do a whole lot of work. They were just always there, always on hand when the tenured PI showed up to be noticed, and so on. They'd mastered the art of appearing to be dogged 24-7 nose-to-the-grindstone researchers, but it was really just a relaxed little club. Most of their en…

I'll second this, I've also seen a lot of people that like to brag about, e.g. working 80 hour weeks, but usually don't actually do much work. At any given moment they're likely talking to someone, or playing on a phone, etc.

As a single dad of a young child, and an academic, this is just impossible for me. I have a few precious hours to work, and need to get the most out of them. I end up being pretty socially isolated at work.

I don't agree with the "you might as well forget about it" thing you wrote. Funding in academia is about explaining why what you want to do actually furthers the agenda of the funding agency. If you can master this skill, you can fund almost any work from almost any funding source. It might sound dishonest, but I am convinced it's actually not- the phenomena in our natural world are all connected, and we don't understand them that well. To solve almost any random problem deeply requires work that translates to fundamental advances in almost everything else. Norbert Wiener explains this well in his book Cybernetics, where he talks about how work on missile guiding technology led to his concept of cybernetics, which was a revolutionary way to understand both engineering and biology.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#58

Post by tpoacher »

As an aside, I'm impressed someone treated Nature as their personal blogpage and now has a nature publication on their CV as a result. I would never have thought if that. Hell, I just saw it happen, and I still wouldnt have thought of it.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#59

Post by kelipso »

kneebonian wrote: post #46
bbor wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If academia had a better effort/reward ratio pre-“X-level”, wouldn’t society reap the benefits of increased interest in those careers?

Well I mean Einstein, Netwon, Maxwell, and Galileo were probably more valuable to advancing our understanding of physics than every one of their contemporaries combined. The funny part is that Einstein wasn't even in academia until after he was famous. If anything this speaks to me that we want only those people in the field who would do it even if there was no reward for they will be the ones who produce earth shatt…

> The funny part is that Einstein wasn't even in academia until after he was famous

No...he was doing his PhD when he published the special relativity and other papers that made him famous.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#60

Post by plonk »

bumby wrote: post #31
photochemsyn wrote: post #19

Back when I was in grad school there was a whole set of research people who just lived at the university - but I noticed, they'd didn't really do a whole lot of work. They were just always there, always on hand when the tenured PI showed up to be noticed, and so on. They'd mastered the art of appearing to be dogged 24-7 nose-to-the-grindstone researchers, but it was really just a relaxed little club. Most of their en…

> rather than into doing groundbreaking innovative research. We probably should first acknowledge that the vast majority of research is incremental and not groundbreaking. > not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about Depending on your interest, this may be a case of expectation management. We should expect that the idea that one can eat your cake and have it too is a rare case.…

> We should expect that the idea that one can eat your cake and have it too is a rare case.

But you’re not eating it, salaries suck in STEM academia compared to private jobs. If you don’t have freedom either, what’s the point?

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