Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A mental health crisis in science

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 212 posts

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#61

Post by dragonwriter »

cornercasechase wrote: post #55
badpun wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- CEO of Microsoft is a child of middle class Indian immigrants - so is CEO of Google - CEO of Apple comes from working/lower-middle class family - CEO of Johnson and Johnson (12th largest SP500 company) is an immigrant from Spain, coming from middle class family etc etc etc

> CEO of Microsoft is a child of middle class Indian immigrants Middle class people aren’t the secretary to the prime minister. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/satya-nadela-microsoft... > so is CEO of Google “His father also had a manufacturing plant that produced electrical components” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai You’re buying the propaganda.

> Middle class people aren’t the secretary to the prime minister.

That sounds quite normal, actually.

But the middle class (the petit bourgeoisie) is a small, economically elite class. It is in the middle between the working class that makes up the vast majority and the even narrower haut borgeoisie — the major capitalists whose relation to the economy centers on control of capital to which rented labor is applied.

Unfortunately, people sometimes confuse the middle class with the middle income segment of the working class, which is a very different thing. (And that confusion is often deliberately exploited.)

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#62

Post by ProjectArcturis »

Fundamentally, the research industry requires continuous exponential growth to accommodate everyone working there. Each PI trains 10+ grad students in their career. Where do those students go? They all want to become PIs themselves. Otherwise why would they get a PhD? Ultimately the majority must be disappointed and leave for positions outside academia.

But leaving academia is a process that takes some time. First cognitively as you give up on your dreams and decide to leave. Then as you search for a new job with no real-world experience and few or no connections.

In the mean time, the pipeline between grad school and professorship gets longer and fuller. Postdocs were once extremely prestigious positions, a sort of "finishing school" for the elite. Now they're standard, and most people need to do more than 1. In practice it's a holding pattern, giving PhDs something to do while they try to struggle to the top of the heap and find an assistant professorship.

And the actual experience of a postdoc! Leave all your friends and move to a new city. Work 60 hours a week for $45k a year. Have the rest of your career controlled by your PI, who you maybe met a few times before you decided to work for them, who has never had any kind of management training, and is under their own severe pressure to publish and bring in new grants. Compete against other brilliant, driven people, many of whom are abusing stimulants, and/or are immigrants with no safety net and willing to work 80+ hours.

How could this system NOT create a mental health crisis?

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#63

Post by [deleted] »

trabant00 wrote: post #29

The world is as good as it's ever has been in human history. Minorities, females, lgbtq members, etc, have more rights, are more protected and represented than ever. Extreme poverty is down, life expectancy is up. Human rights for any group are enforced as never before. But mental health issues are still going up at alarming rates. So it must be something else. I have various hypothesis as to what other causes may be…

[deleted]

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#64

Post by mordae »

_fat_santa wrote: post #3

It seems like this is a symptom of a larger problem, rates of anxiety and depression have been going up in recent years in pretty much every facet. I always hear that social media is to blame, but I wonder if that is really the case? I feel like something else is going on, maybe it's just a totality of smaller issues rather than one big problem.

Perhaps capitalism?

The days of providing new products to the eager market are gone. It simply no longer pays to hire more people and let them solve other people's problems. It's an all-out class war (fighting against unions, bribing politicians, colluding to suppress wage growth and so on) with capitalists infighting about who gets how large share of the emerging rent economy (communications, housing, transportation, food).

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#65

Post by mtriassi »

This makes me wonder how much of this is because research typically happens in an academic setting versus this just being the nature of research.

I wonder if researches from private companies feel the same woes. If so, its probably just the nature of, like others have mentioned, a deliverable / outcome based jobs. I'd imagine (and hope), that at the very least they're paid better and have more resources available to them.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#66

Post by jamesash »

An early stage lab has a lot in common with a startup. The PI is given seed money to validate an ambitious idea and has limited time and resources to do it. The work is extremely labor intensive and in the early stages the PI will be in the trenches with the early employees working in the lab and setting an example for them to follow. Fast failure and pivots are extremely common. Furthermore, at any time the research idea could get scooped by another hard-working research lab, resulting in publication in a lower-tier journal. The PI must get early results that can be used to obtain further research grants. A good PI in this situation will set expectations accordingly that 60+ hour weeks will be required and hopefully those who are not willing to do so will self-deselect. From their perspective I completely not understand not wanting to invest $50k/year of their startup funds in a graduate student who is not putting in the necessary time to succeed. The prospective graduate student's maximum power is at the time when they are choosing a research advisor. Choose wisely, and remember you are always free to choose not to go if you don't see a good situation. I advise that people think long and hard about whether or not they truly want to do graduate school. There are far better ways to spend your 20's than in a lab. I had two great experiences in "intense" labs in my field (organic chemistry) after a very poor experience with a prestigious but absentee graduate advisor in another field - but it is definitely not for everyone.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#67

Post by michaelt »

tptacek wrote: post #30
oaiey wrote: post #13

What I found interesting of this article is that most of it is also applicable to a many tech sector jobs. High pressure to deliver something (because we squeeze the last of people), hire-and-fire practices everywhere, politics and toxic environments (because that is what people do and what is the current social perspective on what is okay). Developers, like scientists, are very outcome driven (number of lines, numbe…

Having now two lab scientists living under my roof, there is nothing even in the stories I've heard of the video game industry that compares to how toxic research culture is. It is next-level, as if being vexatious was a goal on its own --- which, given the culture generation after generation of PIs have come up through, might at this point actually be the case: students and employees are threatened, berated, harasse…

I've heard of incredibly variable experiences from people working on science PhDs.

I've known maths PhD students who found they could only really do 2-3 hours of truly productive maths in a day, allowing them to spend the rest of the day playing games and suchlike, and after two years their supervisor told them they'd got enough interesting results to graduate.

And I've known chemistry PhD students whose supervisors felt if you're doing a mere 8 hours a day of work you might as well drop out now because you're obviously not serious about graduating, and expected their students to be in the lab tending to long-running experiments on evenings, weekends and even christmas day. And yes, we only give you three years of funding but everyone takes four years to graduate.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#69

Post by tptacek »

michaelt wrote: post #67
tptacek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having now two lab scientists living under my roof, there is nothing even in the stories I've heard of the video game industry that compares to how toxic research culture is. It is next-level, as if being vexatious was a goal on its own --- which, given the culture generation after generation of PIs have come up through, might at this point actually be the case: students and employees are threatened, berated, harasse…

I've heard of incredibly variable experiences from people working on science PhDs. I've known maths PhD students who found they could only really do 2-3 hours of truly productive maths in a day, allowing them to spend the rest of the day playing games and suchlike, and after two years their supervisor told them they'd got enough interesting results to graduate. And I've known chemistry PhD students whose supervisors…

I believe it. I've surveyed friends and friends of friends about chem and bio because one of my kids is a biochemist, and that's where most of my telemetry comes from; lab STEM in general has a bad rap, but chem and bio might be distinctively awful.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#70

Post by BeetleB »

jamesash wrote: post #66

An early stage lab has a lot in common with a startup. The PI is given seed money to validate an ambitious idea and has limited time and resources to do it. The work is extremely labor intensive and in the early stages the PI will be in the trenches with the early employees working in the lab and setting an example for them to follow. Fast failure and pivots are extremely common. Furthermore, at any time the research…

> An early stage lab has a lot in common with a startup.

The problem is you also see this behavior in well established lab, where the PI has very little to lose if he quits research altogether.

In my experience, the correlation with whether the professor was an assistant professor seeking tenure vs a well established full professor and the amount of work they make PhD students do is almost nil. It's mostly purely driven by the will of the PI, not the demands of the funding situation. A lot of professors choose to have few graduate students so they don't have to stress too much about funding.

Remember: Once you get tenure, your job is not at risk if your research output is low (although it does affect compensation). If you get a $1M grant and end up with no research papers out of it, there is no accountability - except the granting agency will deprioritize you in the future (if even that).

If you're seeking an advisor, ask his/her current students what life is like. Also find people who graduated under him/her and ask them.

Post reply on HN