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A mental health crisis in science

nature.com

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Re: A mental health crisis in science

#121

Post by Chris2048 »

pelasaco wrote: post #83
trabant00 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article states multiple times that harassment, bullying, abuse and general toxicity is affecting science workers in general, but in particular women and minorities. My post states that said abuses are historically at a low point, especially for those groups, thus can not explain the rise in mental health issues. How exactly does this have "nothing to do with the article"?

Your comment has everything to do with the article, but unfortunately, the "it has nothing to do with the article" is one of the issues with Science. To keep my argumentation on topic: Historically, scientists never had a so safe life like today. In the past, scientists used to put their life at stake. Galileo, Copernicus, Turin, Einstein..

Einstein?

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#122

Post by jrochkind1 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #117
jrochkind1 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a recent Ezra Klein show interview [1] with social scientist Jean Twenge on the documented rise in teenage depression, Twenge found it correlated with a rise in social media use, but also found that increasing social media use was correlated with fewer hours of in-person social interaction among teens than previous. While Twenge wanted to talk about both things (and I'm somewhat suspicious of the certainty of her…

It's everything. Work from home. Self-check-out at the grocery store. Delivery of everything. Telemedicine. Cars instead of walkable neighborhoods or mass transit (or even bicycles). The decline of church attendance. I can't think of one social trend pushing us toward more face-to-face interactions. If it's spanning this many different trends, I think there ought to be some larger thing driving it, but I can't put my…

Agreed with all of your examples.

I mean, to me, the larger thing is probably "capitalism", in which increasing amounts of social life are turned into things that can produce profit for a business. Our particular capitalism built on racism doesn't help either, with it's legacy of "we don't want public amenities because we don't want to fund them for THOSE people" and "we're scared to go outside because a lot of people have a lot of reason to wish us harm." (that we built for cars instead of walkable cities or public transit actually has a LOT to do with racism)

But people don't love talking about this here. Or rather, they do and they don't. :)

In the general socciety, decline of social interaction has probably been a topic of discussion since Robert Putman's 2000 book "Bowling Alone". http://bowlingalone.com/

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#123

Post by Balgair »

contemporary343 wrote: post #118

Speaking as a tenured PI in the (applied) physical sciences, everything here is true but a lot of it boils down to a lack of perspective and imagination by many faculty running labs. There are many positive examples out there of ensuring student career success in a supportive lab environment while also producing good research. These need to be amplified as role models.

Care to share some of those examples?

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#124

Post by searine »

askin4it wrote: post #104
searine wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The fact it's a monster that eats people alive to me is an evidence that the whole thing needs to be torn down and replaced, which is the best way to erase all these sorts of harms. It is easy to tear down but hard to build. I get that you are jaded, but tearing down institutional science is just going to harm future scientists by robbing them of opportunity. Yes the system isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean we ha…

What does Opportunity have to do with science? In this case, it seems like the Opportunity is an opportunity to get trapped in a system that is likely to be both unsatisfactory and unproductive. My fear is that we've crossed the event horizon and we can't rollback all the alterations that accumulated over the years and gotten academics into a cul-de-sac or box canyon. (Pick your metaphor...) next stop, the singularit…

>What does Opportunity have to do with science?

Most science requires specialized tools and materials that cannot be obtained outside of an institutional environment. Tearing down the institutions means ceasing basically all non-profit generating "big science" efforts. That robs future scientists of working on the cutting edge.

A garage lab is fun idea, but the reality is infeasible in most circumstances. Even if possible, it will be slap-shod and a gigantic money pit that no granting agency will give a dime to.

>My fear is that we've crossed the event horizon

Hyperbole. Science existed before institutions and will exist after if it all should come tumbling down. There are more scientists than there has ever been, and as a result a lot of "boring" but necessary science is happening, but that doesn't mean there aren't rebels and outlaws in that same system asking interesting questions and overturning ideas.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#125

Post by jasonhong »

extasia wrote: post #120
EatingWithForks wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I developed a similar conclusion that research as a whole is corrupted when there was that CS student that committed suicide due being affected by paper-approval collusion agreements involving nearly all the prominent researchers in the field. Nothing was done about it, even though it directly contributed to someone's death. I had so much disgust for the field since then.

I wasn't aware of this, do you have a link you could share?

I think it's referring to this case: https://huixiangvoice.medium.com/the-hidden-story-behind-the...

And for outcomes, the paper in question was retracted and the professor involved resigned. However, I haven't seen updates regarding the review ring (where a bunch of peer reviewers collude).

https://retractionwatch.com/2021/03/16/after-grad-student-su...

https://www.wuft.org/news/2021/04/23/university-of-florida-p...

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#126

Post by NeuNeurosis »

nenrkkfn wrote: post #75
bioemerl wrote: post #53

Science as a whole has died a hard death. All reward and prestige of being a researcher has been lost and the people in the study have a slim chance of being able to work with their degree. Which I understand is about the opposite of what this article wants, but you shouldn't trust the people who have broken science to fix it. Research itself gets locked behind tightly walled journals and are written with obscure and…

I had a tenured faculty position at an R1 university and left it in part because of a completely dysfunctional institutional environment with no insight. My best friends include full professors at well-known institutions, though, and I've continued to be involved with academics and research. I'm frankly tired of science being characterized in terms of competitiveness and abuse. That's true, but it's deeper than that.…

This echos so much of the world it seems right now.I have seen this in engineering, analytics, and the restaurant industry.

New people and outsiders still have so much hope for what the paths they choose offer them and once they enter and progress are faced with the "city full of crime...(with) no police" and very little recourse. Engineers that are berated and bullied to output test results that conform to desired product specs, management that wants data that conforms to "projected" trends and bully analysts to "massage" the data accordingly, chefs that are told they have to work 12-16hr 5-6 days a week. These are just the examples that I have personal experience with.

It seems that this structural corruption has everything to do with financial rewards and who holds the purse strings. The group/s that dole out the rewards seem to have played their hand miraculously and convinced everyone that this is the only way.

As I write this it reminds me of threads I was reading 10 years ago about surgery and surgeons and what it took to become apart of that field. It was described as being fraught with super high stress, high precision, high physically demands such as super long shifts (24-48hrs) lack of sleep, and a huge drop out rate. So many of the posters from the industry were saying while it was toxic and terrible it produced world class surgeons and that culture of training and gatekeeping was what kept the profession the best in world.

Would you say that possibly the people maintaining the "structurally corrupt" culture are doing it to maintain a perceived superiority and relevance both financially and socially? What about the political winds constantly undermining the output of the profession when it becomes politically expedient to do so? Do you have any ideas on what change would look like? What are some of the solutions that you and your friends have discussed?

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#127

Post by ordersofmag »

greenhearth wrote: post #91
tptacek wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academic research is funded by grants.

Can these grants provide a living wage?

Wages paid by grants in general have to match whatever the institutions 'standard' pay scales are. So it's the institutions deciding pay rates. At least in the U.S..

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#128

Post by nradov »

greenhearth wrote: post #91
tptacek wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academic research is funded by grants.

Can these grants provide a living wage?

Perhaps so, if universities cut back on overhead. Much of the grant funding is taken away to pay administrators who don't directly contribute to research. There is a huge amount of waste and no real pressure to control costs.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#130

Post by nomadpenguin »

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 think there's a huge division in toxicity between wet bench and computational/dry lab work. If your math PhD friends go on a wild goose chase or slack off for a few weeks, the only thing that is lost is time. In a wet lab, it could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. The stakes, stress, and constant attention required from experiments feeds into the toxicity in wet labs.

Adding to that, a large portion of (important) wet bench work is mind-numbing manual labor. This work really should be done by a tech, but techs are just as if not more expensive than grad students, and techs can leave the job if they're not happy. Which means that grad students are at the bottom of the totem pole of intellectual respect, and PIs who had to do the same expect a lot more "due paying".

Meanwhile, students in computational labs are working from home.

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