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

Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

wuphys.wustl.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 167 posts

Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#111

Post by cli »

danieltillett wrote: post #67

I feel rather conflicted by any advice given to anyone to not become as scientist. I have been through the whole science treadmill all they way up to tenured professor, but I have recently given up tenure to work on my original start-up full time. I loved everything about being an professor except the pointless committee work and paper shuffling, but I reached the point where I felt I could do more good science outsi…

What field are you working in? I am a prospective physics graduate student, and I want to do physics research as a career. However, I am uninterested in going into academia after attaining my PhD, and I am also financially independent due to inheritance.

Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#112

Post by marcosdumay »

nagrom wrote: post #59
UK-AL wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He means science is a public good, everybody wins when a scientist discovers some knowledge/cure/whatever.

But the scientist generally wins less than a programmer who has a moderately good year making a website to help people find other people who would like to walk their dog.

It's almost impossible to sell a public good. A career that focus on them will inevitably get less monetary rewards than one that focus on excludable ones.

A scientist gets less money than a programmer because despite creating much more total wealth on average[1], nobody needs to pay to get a share of the results, thus nobody has much of an incentive to pay.

As a related concept, life ain't fair.

[1] Does he really? I'm going with the common opinion, but I'd love to see data on that.

Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#113

Post by AndrewKemendo »

dekhn wrote: post #84

I think a more nuanced article would instead explain to students how to gain competitive advantage, and work with the system, while simultaneously fulfilling the desire to work on one's own problems of interest. I still don't know for sure if I made the right choice in 1995, sticking to bio grad school, instead of trying to get a job at Yahoo! I mean, had I done the latter, I would likely be independently weathy and…

>I would likely be independently weathy and able to fund any science project I wish

That is what I determined would be the best way to ensure that I could get the research projects I wanted to do actually funded.

Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#114

Post by ben1040 »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #104
ben1040 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of note is that this 1999 essay came back around in 2010 when Katz was tapped by the DoE for a scientific task force evaluating options for the Deepwater Horizon cleanup. He was removed from the group in fairly short order, after people found this essay and put the heat on him for it. Shortly afterwards, Katz' son came out to his father. http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/son-of-homophobic-f...

"After coming out, Katz persuaded his father to remove from his website the "In Defense of Homophobia" essay, written in 1999, when Isaac was 11." The essay appears to be back up, I guess Katz pere doubled down.

From this article from the Washington University student newspaper, it looks like Katz reposted the essay within days after that Post-Dispatch article ran.

http://www.studlife.com/news/2010/10/13/students-come-out-as...

Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#115

Post by RK »

kaybe wrote: post #41
RK wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm under the impression that it has only gotten worse. Anecdote: A super smart friend of mine from physics grad school finished in 2008 and went on to post-docs at Caltech and Harvard. He was unable to get a tenure track job, primarily because in that 4 year timespan only 1 faculty position opened up in the entire US for his (tiny) field. He now works at Google. In fact I'm not sure that anyone from my cohort is sti…

Do you have a write-up of your answers lying around somewhere? I'd be interested.. (half a year to go on a Master's)

No write-up, but people I know have left physics for:

* Quantitative finance

* Insurance (working on models that were beyond what the actuaries were trained to do)

* Data science

* Scientific equipment R&D

* Scientific equipment sales

* Popular science writing (this is a bit of an outlier!)

* Defense contracting (engineering, "scientific" programming, etc)

* Programming

* Door-to-door insurance sales (no joke)

I usually tell people to brush up on their programming skills as much as possible. If you're a theorist who only does pencil + paper or maybe Mathematica, it might be hard to find a decent job. Also, it never hurts to talk to / network with any industry people that are related to your field (software or hardware vendors, etc).

I'm now doing data science, but have also done hardware development and electrical engineering related things (signals). When I was transitioning to data science I also did some very specialized consulting related to my PhD. A few people paid me to do simulations and/or help then implement some techniques that I worked on as a grad student.

Also: I had a very supportive advisor, who encouraged me to accept a job offer before I graduated.

Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#116

Post by navanit »

danieltillett wrote: post #80
drhodes wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds of something Feynman said something in "You Must Be Joking..." "When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards…

I think Feynman was just jealous :) When you consider that von Neumann was at IAS and he managed a huge amount of collaboration of vast importance I think it had more to do with the individual than the environment.

Feynman had an offer from IAS which he declined for the reasons discussed above.

Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#117

Post by lvs »

tcheard wrote: post #58
lvs wrote: post #55

i don't totally disagree with the article, but it's probably worth pointing out that this guy is apparently a "proud homophobe." great. one might question his judgement after reading this drivel. http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/dailyrft/2010/05/washington... http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/defense.html

How is that relevant??? Just because you have very extremist and incorrect views about something outside your profession, doesn't mean that you are automatically incorrect when talking about your profession.

I didn't say he's automatically incorrect, and I think if you reread my comment, that should be clear. I do think a person's subjective judgement on serious issues are relevant to their subjective judgement on any one issue.

Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#118

Post by neltnerb »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #70
dnautics wrote: post #64

The only thing missing is that the grants administrators are very often (I can think of two, dear to me counterexamples) people who got into science and couldn't hack it, making for sort of a bureaucratic dunning-kruger effect. I remember meeting DOE bureaucrats coming to visit our site, and being in awe at their complete lack of basic scientific concepts, and thinking, "these idiots probably get paid six figures to…

I am sadly unimpressed by a lot of people who end up managing investment or research funds. I wonder if it is similar to politicians? It takes some specific social skill to get there, but it doesn't mean you are any good in that position when you get it.

I have found that the NSF is consistently high quality when it comes to grasping the work I propose or do.

Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#119

Post by dnautics »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #70
dnautics wrote: post #64

The only thing missing is that the grants administrators are very often (I can think of two, dear to me counterexamples) people who got into science and couldn't hack it, making for sort of a bureaucratic dunning-kruger effect. I remember meeting DOE bureaucrats coming to visit our site, and being in awe at their complete lack of basic scientific concepts, and thinking, "these idiots probably get paid six figures to…

I am sadly unimpressed by a lot of people who end up managing investment or research funds. I wonder if it is similar to politicians? It takes some specific social skill to get there, but it doesn't mean you are any good in that position when you get it.

I don't think its a "social skills selects orthogonally" problem. Its a "to want this job selects for low intelligence" problem. One of the counterexamples I have in mind chose to pursue the alternative despite being brilliant because as a professor she wound up in a place where the red tape was unbearable and the median quality of postdoc and grad student she was getting was impossibly low to achieve reasonable results, but like I said, I think she is an exception and she rails about the difficulties she has as an administrator (but at least it pays better than professor)

Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#120

Post by danieltillett »

navanit wrote: post #116
danieltillett wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Feynman was just jealous :) When you consider that von Neumann was at IAS and he managed a huge amount of collaboration of vast importance I think it had more to do with the individual than the environment.

Feynman had an offer from IAS which he declined for the reasons discussed above.

I am aware of this - hence the :)

I do think it is more of an issue with the individual than the nature of IAS as great collaborative work was done by people there.

Post reply on HN