Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’
11–20 of 55 posts
Re: Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’
#12"There is no trace of evidence that you can get the best out of people at high-level tasks through pressure and competition. The opposite is true. Worried people get dumber. They may be faster at carrying rocks… but they do not get smarter." That last sentence is a great turn of phrase.
You reminded me of a fantastic video about positive and negative motivation, especially with how they relate to blue-collar vs white-collar work:
Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc)
Re: Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’
#13How to get the best out of people is a millennial long question. Egyptians used whips and slaves, we have been using money and propaganda lately, but everyone uses something that may or may not be the most optimal method. The issue is that people are individual and respond differently each time you ask them. My condolences on the loss of life (I too have felt like the world was asking far too much of me and I had no…
"Best" is a pretty hairy topic. Does it mean "Most fulfilling existance", does it mean "Most benefit to humanity", does it mean "Most benefit to this country/children/etc..." There's no right answer. I submit that "Letting people expressing their freedom in a way that maximally lets others express the same." is more useful/enlightening/profitable than "Getting the best". But that's pedantic and hair splittery, like the rest of my comment.
People aren't priceless. If we were industry would grind to a halt. There has to be a reasonable price on human life or there would be no calculating the impact of 1, 10, or 100 deaths, and then to upper limit on the $ spent on safety. The value of a human life is around 50-100K$/year to 100$K-10$Million Total, depending on the application.
Re: Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’
#14My girlfriend is getting her PhD. We are planning a vacation right now. She works in a lab as a researcher, which is not a "real job" since she's getting her PhD. There are no specific regulations for vacation time, or anything for that matter. However, she's unsure how long she can take for vacation, and unsure whether she should ask her P.I. This is an example of the irony of academia. On one hand, the lack of clea…
> On the other hand, when other people are involved,
> especially those with "seniority" like P.I.'s and
> advisors, it's no longer obvious what decisions you
> should make.
Re: Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’
#15My girlfriend is getting her PhD. We are planning a vacation right now. She works in a lab as a researcher, which is not a "real job" since she's getting her PhD. There are no specific regulations for vacation time, or anything for that matter. However, she's unsure how long she can take for vacation, and unsure whether she should ask her P.I. This is an example of the irony of academia. On one hand, the lack of clea…
Not to pick on your girlfriend but I've seen a variant of this phrase so often that I'm kind of baffled: "the lack of clear policies and regulations governing academia is one of its greatest advantages, because it gives your mind space to explore, and expands creative freedom." Are the folks in academia so creatively stunted that they can't find freedom outside of the ivory tower? It seems like such a silly argument.
Surely there are opportunities outside of academia that do not restrict you to the 9-5 grind or subject you solely to the whims of "the man." But academia is one of the only options where that kind of freedom comes safely packaged and institutionalized. You get the advantages of prestige without the risk of something like entrepreneurship, which may be another option for finding creative freedom.
Re: Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’
#16My girlfriend is getting her PhD. We are planning a vacation right now. She works in a lab as a researcher, which is not a "real job" since she's getting her PhD. There are no specific regulations for vacation time, or anything for that matter. However, she's unsure how long she can take for vacation, and unsure whether she should ask her P.I. This is an example of the irony of academia. On one hand, the lack of clea…
Not to pick on your girlfriend but I've seen a variant of this phrase so often that I'm kind of baffled: "the lack of clear policies and regulations governing academia is one of its greatest advantages, because it gives your mind space to explore, and expands creative freedom." Are the folks in academia so creatively stunted that they can't find freedom outside of the ivory tower? It seems like such a silly argument.
well you could go work at google, amazon, facebook, or microsoft if you felt like writing an unending stream of javascript to better serve people ads. there are researchy parts of those companies but getting a job there is a lot like getting any other academic job in terms of competition and number of applicants, so it's effectively academia.
what wondrous land do you propose that will support researchers and their desire for a few months out of the year to think about stuff? at most companies, you won't get a few minutes out of the day to do anything other than pack numbers tightly into excel or go to your next standup.
Re: Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’
#17The worst consequence of this insecure, anxious, hypercompetitive culture is the near-impossibility of sincere collaboration. I speak from my experience as a very successful grad-student and postdoc in synthetic biology and neuroscience. Unlike equity in a startup, the kudos credit for publishing a high-impact paper is really only split between the first author and the lab PI, removing any incentive for trainees and labs to work together on larger projects. Of course, a great deal of noise is made in grants and PR about academic collaborations, but they are always paper affairs of convenience in securing funding, never truly incentivized joint missions, at least not in the biological sciences. I can't count the number of attempted collaborations that I've seen collapse in heated acrimony. As a result, most academic science is a very lonely affair, and the ambition of what can be achieved today in experimental biology is completely constrained by what one poorly-trained young researcher can do in a few years of hard labor with only a modicum of outside help and advice.
Re: Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to pick on your girlfriend but I've seen a variant of this phrase so often that I'm kind of baffled: "the lack of clear policies and regulations governing academia is one of its greatest advantages, because it gives your mind space to explore, and expands creative freedom." Are the folks in academia so creatively stunted that they can't find freedom outside of the ivory tower? It seems like such a silly argument.
Surely there are opportunities outside of academia that do not restrict you to the 9-5 grind or subject you solely to the whims of "the man." But academia is one of the only options where that kind of freedom comes safely packaged and institutionalized. You get the advantages of prestige without the risk of something like entrepreneurship, which may be another option for finding creative freedom.
Agreed. Academics put up with a lot of crap because they're extremely risk adverse.
Re: Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to pick on your girlfriend but I've seen a variant of this phrase so often that I'm kind of baffled: "the lack of clear policies and regulations governing academia is one of its greatest advantages, because it gives your mind space to explore, and expands creative freedom." Are the folks in academia so creatively stunted that they can't find freedom outside of the ivory tower? It seems like such a silly argument.
well you could go work at google, amazon, facebook, or microsoft if you felt like writing an unending stream of javascript to better serve people ads. there are researchy parts of those companies but getting a job there is a lot like getting any other academic job in terms of competition and number of applicants, so it's effectively academia. what wondrous land do you propose that will support researchers and their d…
I'm just curious, but your comment suggests to me that it is easy to switch from an academic program to working at google, amazon, facebook, or microsoft. Those jobs require training and experience that academia does not provide. Writing javascript and researching, as an example, topology are very different things. I also have a hard time believing that research at a corporation is effectively academia just because they share a competitive environment. Could you explain further?
Re: Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’
#20> This is not, I shouldn't have to say, how academia works. Peter Higgs, of Higgs Boson fame, said that there was 'no Eureka moment' to his work, and he only has 4 papers listed on Google Scholar: but what papers! Science rarely has a Eureka moment: it's rather a series of careful, thoughtful developments of work done by one's forebears and peers. A management which demands a Eureka a day is one which doesn't just not 'get' academia, it's a management which contradicts the academic method and it's one which has forgotten that it's meant to serve the needs of science, the arts, students and researchers, not the insatiable maw of attention seeking 'Leaders' (that's the word they use now) and the PR office. It's also a management that kills.
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