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'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

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Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#271

Post by godelski »

kurthr wrote: post #267
thelittlenag wrote: post #32

My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab, and by extension the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Getting approved for the money via the grant process means having published "interesting" re…

I'm sure you'll find lots of people at her school who know the game, but for everyone else who hasn't heard. In order to get good grants you need to run "successful" experiments, which means you need to propose to find something interesting, but that means you want to already know there's something interesting there. That means you really need to bootstrap to have already run enough of the experiment that you know wh…

> Second thing. The best way to get tenure is to have such a huge group working for you (e.g. 30 grad students), because the provost will be terrified there isn't room for other grant writers in the department to get the money to support them and the lab you've built.

There's another factor too. More students means more papers and your h-index goes up. Were we to suppose that all students were equal and that there is a noise associated with the likelihood of publication and another noise with the number of citations then if either of those noise variables are large, you should maximize quantity over quality. Because you're simply increasing the odds that you'll hit a jackpot.

In fact, if you pull the data from csrankings.org you'll find that the first 30 (all I pulled because I'm lazy and not a web person) school's rank is practically a function of the number of publishing professors at that university. So the "more workers = more better" tactic actually scales from lab to department. If we look a little harder, I think we can all see the limitation of the metrics being used here and why they're so easy to hack. More importantly, why these metrics result in a dominating momentum force (aka. rich get richer). Maybe we should start reevaluating how we are evaluating systems. After all, it is neither fair nor an efficient usage of resources. If we're going to continue the trend though, the only solution is to allocate more resources... (which to be fair the pool of available resources is increasing year over year, but the allocation isn't)

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#272

Post by StressedDev »

mjburgess wrote: post #160
quacked wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I'd agree that Reason and Merit are always applied by the market, unless the market is referring to "whatever VCs can be convinced to give money to". However, the crux of what you're saying, which is that in academia Reason and Merit are thrown directly out of the window is completely true. My favorite discrepancy is in hiring. In startups, you can win a $150k/year job in a ten minute conversation wit…

In the medium term, on average, the market tends to kill-off sheer stupidity. It is kinda traumatic in the short-term to see how much stupidity is rewarded, of course. (And here, are VCs anything more than serial idiots?) But if you really want to persue a basically competent merit-based path, there's usually one available. You can make 2x in a crypto conjob, or 1x on a gamble that someone needs a plausible value-add…

A VC which is a serial idiot will eventually run out of money. One thing to remember is that not all VCs are the same and there probably are some which are very good at what they do.

Another way of saying this is just because some VCs are not good at their job does not mean all VCs are not good at their job.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#274

Post by caddemon »

jancsika wrote: post #250
vineyardmike wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not laundering money in the criminal sense, it’s just removing restrictions and contractual limitations. If I’m a grant giver, I want my money to go towards the consumables of research, not fund CapEx that can be used for someone else’s research. If I’m a lab, I want/need fancy and reusable equipment, which is excluded in the grant terms. Some of the grant money goes to “university administration” (pick your ter…

To provide a helpful analogy: Suppose you want to get karma for a low-effort take on an engineering forum. If you say, for example, "academia is just like the mafia," the low-effort will be immediately recognized and down-voted. Alternatively, you can make an assertion that is outside of the scope of engineering. Like "this is actually money laundering." Engineers don't have the expertise to assess that, but they wil…

It's funny that you use "academia is like the mafia" as an example that we are supposed to find outrageous. The labor structure of academia has a number of similarities with how gangs operate: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/ho...

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#276

Post by caddemon »

blululu wrote: post #220
godelski wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little of both. The problem is that evaluation of research work is insanely difficult. A lot of people think it's easy because "the world is objective, it either works or doesn't" but research is cutting edge and you're only chipping away at a much larger picture. It can take decades for a work to reveal itself as truly profound or utter shit. The problem, which I rant about in a longer comment, is that instead of…

We have been increasing funding for 50 years and the problem has not been fixed. America currently sets the record in science funding (in raw amount and percentage of gdp) for any society in History and it seems to have these issues. Even if increasing funding would solve the problem, it is, at best, a short term fix. So long as there is growth in the system you can hide a lot of blight and rot. There is enough to go…

Yeah any increase in funding needs to go to meaningfully different grant processes. Giving more money to the existing funding structures will not fix a damn thing. Because the present system is just woefully unscaleable. More money to current NIH -> more PhD students -> tenure track competition remains fucking ridiculous.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#278

Post by zamfi »

golem14 wrote: post #207
ChuckMcM wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is also why I think the single biggest innovation starter billionaires could do would be to apply grant funds to new Professors for interesting research.

Not a billionaire, but of course this would be great. Are there good suggestions on how to do that without paying the university overhead AND being tax advantaged ? I cannot just go and give Professor X $10K to do this research and claim a tax writeoff. Are there existing nonprofits who do this ? Are there Howtos on setting up such nonprofits ? Genuinely interested. Not just for academia, even for open source. I can…

> I cannot just go and give Professor X $10K to do this research and claim a tax writeoff.

You absolutely can. These are called “gifts”. Typically, the overhead rate is very low (~10%?) and they are tax deductible as a charitable contribution.

That said, you don’t then get to say “do this research” directly. (That’s called a “directed research” grant and comes with a higher overhead.) But you would basically only give money to a lab that’s already doing research you find interesting — and of course you can talk to them about the research you’d want them to do, this distinction just refers to whether there’s a contract for specific research activities or not.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#279

Post by jltsiren »

WoodenChair wrote: post #266
KennyBlanken wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sick of lies and misrepresentations from people who clearly don't know what they're talking about, talking like schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money. First off: grants from most places factor in the administrative overhead. That is negotiated between the school and the grant org. For the NIH, it averages fifty percent. The school/university is very restricted in what they can…

> First off: grants from most places factor in the administrative overhead. That is negotiated between the school and the grant org. For the NIH, it averages fifty percent. You write as if a 50% administrative overhead is healthy. In non-regulatory captured industries it's almost unheard of. Even most non-profits that are considered the best by Charity Navigator have administrative overheads of <20%.

First, charities are closer to research funders than grant recipients. They are more likely to hire contractors to do the actual work or just send the money instead of doing the work themselves.

Second, academic overhead rates are usually stated relative to direct costs. A 50% overhead rate means 1/3 of total costs.

Third, it's not just administrative overhead, but it's also used for paying for facilities and the services required for using and maintaining them. The actual administrative overhead, for administrative services and facilities used by the administration, is usually below 20% of the total.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#280

Post by brutusborn »

etrautmann wrote: post #163
mlsu wrote: post #135

Reading the comments here, it seems that even very prestigious universities are full of academic pettiness and dysfunction which deny all of us the output of brilliant people like Katalin Karikó. It leaves me wondering: why do we not create any new universities? Why doesn't a Carnegie of our age create a new university? Brin University? Zuck University? This seems like a no brainer. I think it might seem difficult to…

Unless the organization is fundamentally structured with difference incentives, I'm not sure it'll achieve a different outcome. It's a hard but necessary challenge to prioritize research, which requires that every research group advocate the utility of their work and be evaluated in comparison with others.

Isn’t constant evaluation the problem? If you don’t have to churn out papers to meet evaluation requirements then most of the perverse incentives disappear.

It sounds like the best institutions hire great teams and just let them be. Check up on them to ensure some progress, but don’t make artitrary requirements like “>3 papers in a journal with impact factor > [arbitrary cutoff]

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