71–80 of 112 posts
- Science is broken and needs to be fixed
- A 22-year-old bioengineer taught himself how to code
- The author started Microryza
and now this is on the HN front page. Did I miss an important sentence somewhere, or is that the actual summary?
The comments for this article are loading on top of the article itself. It's completely unreadable. Anyone else seeing this?
I've been doing a lot of analysis of organizational decline over the past month, and what characterizes R&D (including academia) is extreme convexity: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/gervais-macle... Convexity pertains to the shape of the curve for output (profits, value added, impact) per input (investment, skill, effort, and just plain luck). It pertains to desirable risk behavior (convex => seek ris…
Hmm, I think the problem is slightly different. The job of a tenured professor in 1980 was pretty sweet. Upper middle class salary, great job security, a soap box from which to influence impressionable minds, freedom to pursue intellectual interests, etc. Naturally, as with any career track that looks pretty sweet, people rush to enter the field. Thus the great numbers of grad students. There are basically three ways…
While I'm not sure this is the case in all fields, at least in mine, when you apply for grants, people too much about how famous you already are and what you have published. People don't care about how many grants you already have, or how much money you burned through to produce your previous publications.
This is bad.
First, it creates the illusion that there are more scientists out there than can be sustained by grant funding, when in reality the problem isn't lack of funding, but the fact that the funding gets concentrated in the hands of the highly successful instead of being evenly distributed to the highly and moderately successful. Thus, pursuing a career in science becomes risky because you might not be able to get a job (as GP stated), and so people decide they don't want to do science.
Second, it's inefficient. A professor at my institution employs 50 people and produces about 1 paper per year. 15 moderately successful professors with 2 people working under each of them could do much better than that. But he has a Nobel prize and they don't.
Finally, it's horrible for the people in these labs. This is where accountability comes in. A professor with a small lab is accountable for the success of each of his students/postdocs. With larger labs, professors can allow students to fail, because their success is no longer necessary for success of the labs. Moreover, professors run out of ideas and waste their trainees' time. (I have heard rumors that a different Nobel prize winning scientist hired multiple people to work on the same project, not as collaborators, but as competitors. The person who won got a high-impact publication. The person who lost got nothing.)
There's no obvious solution here, since science can't be funded completely algorithmically, but to start I think that funding agencies should be requiring professors to disclose both the number of personnel they employ and their grant history when they apply for further grants, and take this into account during the review process.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, I think the problem is slightly different. The job of a tenured professor in 1980 was pretty sweet. Upper middle class salary, great job security, a soap box from which to influence impressionable minds, freedom to pursue intellectual interests, etc. Naturally, as with any career track that looks pretty sweet, people rush to enter the field. Thus the great numbers of grad students. There are basically three ways…
I think that, in a sense, a) would have been the right solution here. While I'm not sure this is the case in all fields, at least in mine, when you apply for grants, people too much about how famous you already are and what you have published. People don't care about how many grants you already have, or how much money you burned through to produce your previous publications. This is bad. First, it creates the illusio…
All I saw in that post is basically: - Science is broken and needs to be fixed - A 22-year-old bioengineer taught himself how to code - The author started Microryza and now this is on the HN front page. Did I miss an important sentence somewhere, or is that the actual summary?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that, in a sense, a) would have been the right solution here. While I'm not sure this is the case in all fields, at least in mine, when you apply for grants, people too much about how famous you already are and what you have published. People don't care about how many grants you already have, or how much money you burned through to produce your previous publications. This is bad. First, it creates the illusio…
Who exactly decides how to allocate these grants? Professional federal government bureaucrats? Fellow professors in the field? Do you have any insight on why they choose to allocate the grants in such an inefficient way? Is the classic "no one ever gets blamed for buying the name brand" dynamic (where the famous professor is the "name" brand)? Or is it more sinister insider dealing and back scratching?
Part of the problem is that the grants are numerically scored, and this scoring is primarily based on the merit of the proposal and the publication record of the lab. The lab budget isn't taken into account, and no one actually checks to make sure the project hasn't already been funded (see http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/science/study-suggests-dup...). There is additional funding for young investigators, but otherwise, the funding agencies treat a process like they are funding a project, when in reality they are also funding a lab. The assessment is with regard to scientific impact, not scientific impact per dollar.
The "no one ever gets blamed for buying the name brand" dynamic is probably a factor, but I doubt it's a very big one. If you win a Nobel, it seems that you're guaranteed grants for life, but otherwise, your research still gets defunded if you don't produce anything for a while, even if you were once at the forefront of your field. People are probably more likely to vote to give grants to their friends, but I don't think there's systematic manipulation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, I think the problem is slightly different. The job of a tenured professor in 1980 was pretty sweet. Upper middle class salary, great job security, a soap box from which to influence impressionable minds, freedom to pursue intellectual interests, etc. Naturally, as with any career track that looks pretty sweet, people rush to enter the field. Thus the great numbers of grad students. There are basically three ways…
> Option b) is the path the universities took You're sort of right, but we aren't deliberately weeding out people. This year, I was on the hiring committee for a tenure-track mathematics hire in my academic department. The job market is extraordinarily competitive this year, and sucks rocks for candidates. It follows that we were able to hire somebody truly outstanding.
Is this because boomers consistently voted for tax via over safety net and then squandered that money so cannot afford to retire? Maybe. Is it because they're healthier than prior generations at the same age and the size of their demographic bulge means there are just more folks who don't feel ready to retire? Possibly.
In the US tenure systems are killers for younger talent. In my subject they led to one dominant branch of physics dominating tenure tracks - string theorists - with no real opportunities for other ideas ...now 20 years on and string theory appears to have been a terrible squandering of a lot of talent with little predictive science emerging from all that work.
It's somewhat depressing.
I once had a letter published in new scientist when I was an undergrad pointing out that there were no career paths for scientists as financially attractive as the most basic entry level job available to non-scientists. But that was nearly 20 years ago. Things have just got worse since.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Option b) is the path the universities took You're sort of right, but we aren't deliberately weeding out people. This year, I was on the hiring committee for a tenure-track mathematics hire in my academic department. The job market is extraordinarily competitive this year, and sucks rocks for candidates. It follows that we were able to hire somebody truly outstanding.
My question is what did you pay him? If the job market is really such a buyers market, instead of hiring one guy at $100k/yr, why not hire two at $50k/yr?