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Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

chemistry-blog.com

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Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#41

Post by quickben »

jknoepfler wrote: post #21

This reads like someone complaining about the time requirements to be a member of a top athletic club or top kitchen or top theatre or any other highly demanding discipline. The only way this behaviour would be "wrong" is if candidates were mislead when they entered about what would be expected of them. If you aren't willing to sacrifice, then don't. You can make a rational choice and walk away with your pride and fu…

Isn't labour law supposed to prevent abuses like this? I mean, I see your point, but the guy that wrote that letter had some characteristics of a textbook psychopath.

We had one like him few years back. One person in a large team was enough to demoralize all, team lead dropped out, few left. All this took months. Yes that one guy was marginally more senior, but the abuse cost a lot more in team productivity output than the seniority experienced output of that one problematic employee.

So yea, if it was my call, people like that will be out asap and off to be given proper medical help, rather than poisoning the team environment for everybody.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#42

Post by dnautics »

Retric wrote: post #22
dnautics wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, this kind of pressure from an advisor breaks labor laws, but a postdoc is going to do this anyways because their contract is short-term, and if they don't rack up an achivement in that time, they're either have to be 1) lucky 2) a superstar, or 3) going to be kicked to the curb in terms of finding future employment. Science is often not something you can arbitrarily knock down into a 9-5. E.G: The enzyme assay…

Sounds like this just needs automation. Further people working 100 hour weeks make so many mistakes their work flat out can't be trusted. And should automatically be rejected by any sane review board on that basis alone. Not that it will be but as has been shown many times 'modern' science is fairly broken.

when you're at the bleeding edge, if you try to automate your way out of a solution, you will develop poor judgement. One of my grad student cohorts worked on a project where she automated large swaths of her project (which still required about 40-60h prep time). Early on during one of her group meetings, I urged her to take a closer look at her findings and not use automation for her work, but she didn't. I specifically warned her that "she might be chasing ghosts for years", and to not take my warning as any sort of judgment on her character. Later, she found that the thousands of observations she made were artefactual, a result of the automation kit she was using. Nonetheless I have a lot of respect for her for twisting the arm of her PI to allow her to publish the retraction report.

Original report: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.363/full

Retraction report: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.2339/full

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#43

Post by madengr »

Someone wrote: post #19
sndean wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You hold postdocs strictly to labor laws, and they are going to be at a disadvantage to the postdocs that are crazy enough to do what needs to be done. You hold all postdocs strictly to labor laws, and hard science simply doesn't happen. I experienced this as a grad student, too. You essentially were at a disadvantage if you had a social life. But you can extend this all the way down to high schoolers (or before?),…

All the way down to kindergarten. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-china-schools-6ccb... : "When Doudou Wong from Shanghai was four, she began attending additional math, Chinese, and English classes outside of her weekday kindergarten"

Wow, that's f'd up.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#44

Post by dnautics »

sndean wrote: post #15
dnautics wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, this kind of pressure from an advisor breaks labor laws, but a postdoc is going to do this anyways because their contract is short-term, and if they don't rack up an achivement in that time, they're either have to be 1) lucky 2) a superstar, or 3) going to be kicked to the curb in terms of finding future employment. Science is often not something you can arbitrarily knock down into a 9-5. E.G: The enzyme assay…

> You hold postdocs strictly to labor laws, and they are going to be at a disadvantage to the postdocs that are crazy enough to do what needs to be done. You hold all postdocs strictly to labor laws, and hard science simply doesn't happen. I experienced this as a grad student, too. You essentially were at a disadvantage if you had a social life. But you can extend this all the way down to high schoolers (or before?),…

> You essentially were at a disadvantage if you had a social life.

I actually think that is an incorrect myth. You can have a social life, you just have to pick social activities that are compatible with the grueling schedule. For example, I took up social dancing, which meets with a regular weekly pattern, and I was able to plan my experiments around it.

If you expect to have nonscientist friends that want to impromptu go out all weekend every weekend, well, that's maybe not going to happen, but I think that a lot of scientists use the process as an excuse to justify their social anxiety - the causal arrow here is in the wrong direction.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#45

Post by sjg007 »

Someone wrote: post #19
sndean wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You hold postdocs strictly to labor laws, and they are going to be at a disadvantage to the postdocs that are crazy enough to do what needs to be done. You hold all postdocs strictly to labor laws, and hard science simply doesn't happen. I experienced this as a grad student, too. You essentially were at a disadvantage if you had a social life. But you can extend this all the way down to high schoolers (or before?),…

All the way down to kindergarten. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-china-schools-6ccb... : "When Doudou Wong from Shanghai was four, she began attending additional math, Chinese, and English classes outside of her weekday kindergarten"

It actually goes all the way down to the womb and then to conception.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#46

Post by dnautics »

Kenji wrote: post #33
dnautics wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, this kind of pressure from an advisor breaks labor laws, but a postdoc is going to do this anyways because their contract is short-term, and if they don't rack up an achivement in that time, they're either have to be 1) lucky 2) a superstar, or 3) going to be kicked to the curb in terms of finding future employment. Science is often not something you can arbitrarily knock down into a 9-5. E.G: The enzyme assay…

Sure, this kind of pressure from an advisor breaks labor laws, but a postdoc is going to do this anyways because their contract is short-term, and if they don't rack up an achivement in that time, they're either have to be 1) lucky 2) a superstar, or 3) going to be kicked to the curb in terms of finding future employment. Living under a bridge would be better than enduring this kind of stress. People have to take a s…

To say nobody can do that is overgeneralization. Some people can (A surprising number of scientists are ultramarathon runners). But also, a lot of people going through the scientists do wind up mentally damaged, and many of them become PIs.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#47

Post by yomly »

cshimmin wrote: post #23
rayiner wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've accurately described the status quo, but I'm not sure you've presented a good justification for it. There is no reason to believe the folks motivated by money are any less talented than the folks that aren't motivated by money. If science excludes people who don't want to work long hours for low pay, that's probably detrimental to society.

Hey, as a scientist, if you want to throw more money at science (to attract the population of talented people who are also money-motivated), I'm all for it! It would be interesting to see if it would "trickle down" and make the research better. It would also be interesting to see if you get an influx of grifters chasing after a piece of the pie, resulting in lower-quality science ("Trump laboratories! We have the bes…

10/10 times I would rather scientists conducting nebulous research than crunching spreadsheets for a bank.

The point is you have a pool of people who are talented and can do things that other people can't, they're contributing more to society than most and they're expected to do this for free.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#48

Post by dnautics »

zimzam wrote: post #16
dnautics wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, this kind of pressure from an advisor breaks labor laws, but a postdoc is going to do this anyways because their contract is short-term, and if they don't rack up an achivement in that time, they're either have to be 1) lucky 2) a superstar, or 3) going to be kicked to the curb in terms of finding future employment. Science is often not something you can arbitrarily knock down into a 9-5. E.G: The enzyme assay…

Some tasks aren't fit for a single person: why can't one post-doc do the prep shift and a second post-doc do the enzyme work? The way we structure our research institutions is arbitrary: we can and should restructure them if they aren't working.

well, when you do that, the second post-doc does the enzyme work, and doesn't notice one little thing that the first post-doc does that messes up the experiment, 30% of the time. It's like why do hospitals make doctors and nurses pull long shifts? One of the major sources of errors is handoff error, where passing a patient from continuous care by one person to another results in loss of experiential knowledge accumulated over that time, which is why medical staff tend to pull 16 hour shifts instead of 8 hour shifts (which would double the handoff error).

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#49

Post by ageofwant »

dnautics wrote: post #12
guelo wrote: post #7

It's a violation of labor laws. Universities argue that they can bypass labor laws by calling it education but there have been some recent rulings against that argument in postdoc unionization cases.

Sure, this kind of pressure from an advisor breaks labor laws, but a postdoc is going to do this anyways because their contract is short-term, and if they don't rack up an achivement in that time, they're either have to be 1) lucky 2) a superstar, or 3) going to be kicked to the curb in terms of finding future employment. Science is often not something you can arbitrarily knock down into a 9-5. E.G: The enzyme assay…

Absolute nonsense.

This is simply bad management. This task should be handled by a team that is managed by simple tools available since people stared to write shit down. So your paper have a few more authors and the Prof can claim he rightfully needs more postdocs, more postdocs get employed, have real lives and will by simply being able to sleep be vastly more productive. Real science will get done faster, better, with better paper trails and attract smarter people to the field that will currently simply not stand for this kind of shit.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#50

Post by yyhhsj0521 »

pjlegato wrote: post #25
Someone wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the way down to kindergarten. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-china-schools-6ccb... : "When Doudou Wong from Shanghai was four, she began attending additional math, Chinese, and English classes outside of her weekday kindergarten"

And the worst part: This sort of draconian training regimen doesn't even work. If it did, China would have far more Nobel Prizes than it does.

It works [1]. The problem is that Nobel Prize has little to do with kindergarten and average people.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/03/pisa-r...

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