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An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

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Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#31

Post by moron4hire »

dnautics wrote: post #28
irollboozers wrote: post #23

3 out of 6 of Microryza's current team are graduate school dropouts. Technically, you could add 1.5 more (Ethan Perlstein left academia, I never started), so 4.5 out of 6. We've all been there. I think you have to either be purposely oblivious or one of the extremely lucky ones blessed with a true research environment, but it is impossible for the new generation of scientists to not see the writing on the wall. Every…

while a PhD doesn't carry that much cachet anymore, doesn't that make 'PhD dropout' even worse? Isn't the impression then, that 'You couldn't finish even the lowered standards for the PhD' or 'You couldn't finish what you started' or 'You had the poor judgement to bite off something you couldn't handle'? I suppose the last isn't so bad given that the age that most Americans start grad school is just over 22

Actually, I see a lot of value in people who can recognize sunk costs and quit wasting resources, no matter how much they have happened to already waste. We all make mistakes, it's whether or not we choose to continue to make mistakes that is important.

Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#32

Post by crishoj »

dnautics wrote: post #28
irollboozers wrote: post #23

3 out of 6 of Microryza's current team are graduate school dropouts. Technically, you could add 1.5 more (Ethan Perlstein left academia, I never started), so 4.5 out of 6. We've all been there. I think you have to either be purposely oblivious or one of the extremely lucky ones blessed with a true research environment, but it is impossible for the new generation of scientists to not see the writing on the wall. Every…

while a PhD doesn't carry that much cachet anymore, doesn't that make 'PhD dropout' even worse? Isn't the impression then, that 'You couldn't finish even the lowered standards for the PhD' or 'You couldn't finish what you started' or 'You had the poor judgement to bite off something you couldn't handle'? I suppose the last isn't so bad given that the age that most Americans start grad school is just over 22

Depending on your point of view, 'PhD dropout' could also carry connotations of having sound judgement and the audacity to act accordingly and quit despite doing so being somewhat controversial.

Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#34

Post by rayiner »

foobarbazqux wrote: post #27
rayiner wrote: post #3

I wonder why we impart onto young people such an idealism about science only to have to crush it when they get older and must be informed that science, like everything else, is a business.

The optimistic answer is that we pass on to our children what we wish were true for us, hoping that this time it will be different. The pessimistic answer is that idealists make very hard workers, such that by the time they become cynics they've already locked themselves into a career path and it's hard to get out of it. It seems the problem we have with science being a business is the belief that money is fundamenta…

I don't have a problem with science being a business. I have a problem with it being presented to kids as some idealistic pure thing.

Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#35

Post by nilkn »

rayiner wrote: post #3

I wonder why we impart onto young people such an idealism about science only to have to crush it when they get older and must be informed that science, like everything else, is a business.

It may just be an artifact of the expanding population. It wasn't too long ago that many young people also harbored an idealism about working for big companies: go to college, get a nearly guaranteed job at a corporation, work there for 25-30 years, retire with a pension. But we all know that each of these steps is less guaranteed today than it was for the previous generation, sometimes significantly so. It's the same for academia.

As we cram more and more people into the same cities, the same companies, the same institutions of learning, they're going to experience some failures to scale. This is one of those failures. Academia becomes hyper-competitive. There aren't enough jobs. School becomes too expensive. Home prices outpace inflation and wage increases by a factor of three or more. The world is just much more competitive today, and it will continue to become even more competitive.

I sometimes think about my grandfather, now dead, who was a sales executive for a major clothing company in the 60s and 70s. He was making $50k in 1960. According to an inflation calculator, that would be nearly $400k today in base salary. It astounds me to reflect on this and the fact that he didn't even have a college degree. A similar job today would likely only go to a graduate of Harvard Business School, Wharton, or something similar. There were many others like him; you didn't have to be a business whiz extraordinaire to land such a job fifty years ago. You just had to be dedicated, hard-working, personable, and passionate, and everything else would follow. But the world was just not nearly as competitive back then.

Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#36

Post by mturmon »

"The art world got smaller, once more a somewhat parochial little world known mostly to its initiates. You can suffocate in these little worlds if you get them confused with the real world, so the smaller they are, as far as I'm concerned, the less confusion they generate."

--Gary Indiana

Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#37

Post by mayanksinghal »

pertinhower wrote: post #12

A hate to trivialize a thoughtful article with a typographical point, but boy do I like my paragraph breaks when I can get them.

Try this:

  javascript:{v=document.createElement('style');v.innerHTML='blockquote{font-size:14px;width:500px}blockquote div{padding-bottom:8px}';document.body.appendChild(v)};void(0);

Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#38

Post by gajomi »

dnautics wrote: post #11
gajomi wrote: post #8

Can someone please change `wity' to `with' in the title? This critique is well written and was interesting for me to read, having just finished my PhD a few months ago. I can relate to a number of the issues he raised. However, I must take issue with his point (8). While I think it certainly is important to make sure that academics contribute back to larger society in some capacity, I think it is a bit premature to c…

the difficulty with 'basic research with seemingly no value' (a good example is the fourier transform, which at the time was seen as a mathematical curiosity) - is that it lacks accountability. How do you make sure that the academe that is selling their project as 'basic research' isn't just pulling a fast one on you and sucking your funds to tickle their intellectual jollies? This problem is even worse when you take…

This is a very good point and I think I would like to refine my comment in response to it.

I think it is important to distinguish between individual vs collective accountability, as well as accountability within a field and the accountability of the field to larger society. My argument for supporting basic research in a field assumes that there is internal accountability within that field and that the research makes sense to those within it even if there is no direct application. In this view accountability of the individual to society is mediated by the accountability of the field at large to society. This is what allows for various sorts of bet hedging (if we think of a field as a firm) to improve the chances of hitting the rare event where a basic result has a big impact. If there is a deterioration of transparency accountability within a field, perhaps due to the mechanisms the OP describes in points (1-7) then (8) does become a problem. So I have perhaps a different understanding of (8) then the OP. I do not argue that some particular flavor of esoteric mathematics be supported because 'it will be useful someday'. Rather I argue that, so long as there is intellectual integrity within mathematics (or whatever other field) that one should expect some small fraction of the esoteric theoretical research will yield big returns, and that these returns will subsidize the failed efforts. This kind of mechanism allows for the possibility to support t=infinity timescale research with accountability checks of the collective at finite timescales.

Now, if we start to deviate from my assumption of integrity within a field and my scenario of field as idealized firms, there are all sort of interesting game theoretical questions that pop up. For example, what sort of internal rewards and punishments within a field are needed to keep things honest? I don't know, but I think it is interesting to think about.

Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#39

Post by irollboozers »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #22

It's interesting to think though, that government funding has produced nearly every single form of medicine we have, it funded einstein, it was indirectly responsible for the internet. The problem is that you have to pay a bunch of parasites to support the few who are actually advancing the human race.

It's inefficient and creates negative externalities.

Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

#40

Post by foobarbazqux »

rayiner wrote: post #34
foobarbazqux wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The optimistic answer is that we pass on to our children what we wish were true for us, hoping that this time it will be different. The pessimistic answer is that idealists make very hard workers, such that by the time they become cynics they've already locked themselves into a career path and it's hard to get out of it. It seems the problem we have with science being a business is the belief that money is fundamenta…

I don't have a problem with science being a business. I have a problem with it being presented to kids as some idealistic pure thing.

Oh, I didn't mean you by "we", I meant the culture at large, specifically the scientific education system which never talks about money, outside of philosophy / policy / ethics classes.
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