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Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

chemistry-blog.com

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Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#61

Post by x0x0 »

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…

And you can see a letter further down the page from Paul Glassman and Albert Meyers that is much more in that vein. They mention 60 hours and list things that students are expected to do, learn, and keep abreast of. They also mention that if the students perform well, they will do their best to aid them both in learning and in getting a desired job. It reads very differently than the letter by Carreira. Particularly in Glassman and Meyers focus on results that require lots of hard work, whereas Carreira focuses on having his poor employees' asses in the lab all hours of the day...

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#62

Post by projektir »

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…

Top clubs where people one up each other are fine for useless activities. They are decidedly not fine for science, which is extremely important to humanity as a whole.

[also, people in athletics are not this dumb and figured out that you do not want to train 24/7 because that's not how the body works. That's not how the brain works, either, trust me]

This has nothing to do with discipline. I guarantee that this is hilariously inefficient, scares off all the good potential scientists because they actually have a shred of self-respect, and is probably contributing to a lot of social and mental problems in the country as a whole. The "work until you die" rhetoric has always been moralistic, not scientific.

This, this right here, is the only explanation anyone should need for perceived lack of scientific progress. How can anything useful at all grow in an environment like this? It's a miracle when it does.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#63

Post by arcanus »

jostmey wrote: post #11
arcanus wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dismiss its wage problems at your own peril. It's far worse than this. In my field, even in industry I have had far more lucrative offers from quantitative hedge funds than any industrial research labor. Let alone staying in academia, where it literally starts to become a factor of four (or more) difference in salary between a postdoc and finance. The only reason I did not bite is because I am fortunate enough to h…

Don't count on your research job in industry remaining stable if it can be outsourced to a university lab. The ceiling on your pay is that of a postdoc's plus university overhead.

> if it can be outsourced to a university lab

Thankfully, my work is sufficiently specialized and my background is strong enough I am not easily replaced. However, like many on HN I'm not representative of the general population and am certainly in a fortunate position. I am on a 'tenure track' in an organization where proprietary work and intellectual property I develop is legitimately valued.

But broadly, I agree. And I've seen some pretty horrific results along the lines you alluded occur to several of my colleagues.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#64

Post by projektir »

sseagull wrote: post #56
yomly wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've always thought of it as the economy will always take advantage of people who enjoy doing something like this. Ie, If you love science, you may be willing to take a lower wage. Eventually, it becomes very exploitative, with long hours and lower wages "just because" it's something you enjoy (even though it is quite beneficial to society). I wonder if there is a term/concept for this in economics or sociology. I've…

That doesn't make sense. Science can have huge contributions, and any decent capitalistic system must reward that. If you have people working for poor wages while doing important things, it means the wrong group of people got too much power.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#65

Post by projektir »

cshimmin wrote: post #20
zimzam wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Often times at the bleeding edge of research, that one postdoc is literally the only person in the world who can do both tasks. Also, most research projects are short enough on funding as it is. So what if you declare that this lab either has to 1) hire two people do to this job in shifts or 2) simply not do the research at all? You get back to the same situation dnautics mentioned where the truly passionate/competit…

> Often times at the bleeding edge of research, that one postdoc is literally the only person in the world who can do both tasks.

I thought we just said earlier how easily replaceable this post-doc is.

Not buying it. Bleeding edge of research doesn't really exist, it just doesn't move fast enough to have any sort of "bleeding edge". It's slowed down by lack of money and poor management and too much bureaucracy far more than it is by someone not working long hours. As has always been true with these things.

This is why startups will, sadly, end up beating academic science over time. Because startups are bleeding edge.

"It has to be this way!" is a very difficult claim to verify, you can't expect others merely to accept it, you must prove it, and I have seen very little evidence so far, including from my own experience with people who did research at university.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#66

Post by sndean »

dnautics wrote: post #44
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?),…

> 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 improm…

> You can have a social life, you just have to pick social activities that are compatible with the grueling schedule.

This was something I was never able to find. Maybe it was just me trying to justify my social anxiety, but the alternative to being in the lab always seemed to be all-night benders or similar. Envious you were able to find something. I should've been more proactive.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#67

Post by projektir »

dnautics wrote: post #48
zimzam wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 accumul…

Yet we have a movement toward shorter hours for hospital staff right now due to all the errors committed by overworked people and burnout issues. Expecting mere humans to keep track of logistical things is already a mistake - use computers, use checklists, etc., medical issues due to expecting a human to remember things is already a problem. It's not like these policies are chosen by nurses themselves, they're chosen by those whom it does not affect.

I very much doubt that this reason you claim has been properly looked at. Every single time I look at a situation like this it never happens for a good reason, but because someone was greedy and was trying to cut costs somewhere. The main reason this gets written off as OK is because nobody cares about nurses, or post-docs, or whatever other group of exploited people. They're replaceable and interchangeable and are just thrown through the grinder because it's cheaper than figuring things out properly. The cost of burnout is never considered because the implementers can get away with not bearing it.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#68

Post by projektir »

dnautics wrote: post #46
Kenji wrote: post #33

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. 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.

I believe it's extremely harmful for science to assume that the only people who can contribute meaningful science are those that a) put up with awful work conditions and b) can be ultramarathon runners. You don't see a problem with that selection process? Does that correlation not alarm you?

May want to consider how many people would not have survived that kind of environment.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#69

Post by projektir »

jostmey wrote: post #2

Hacker news has seen a lot of posts on this subject. The usual advice is to work in industry, where people are apparently treated like human beings. I am sure this is true, but the advice isn't helpful to me. Society benefits from scientific research. Dismiss its wage problems at your own peril. Sadly, a lot of research is outsourced to universities because labor is cheap. Why pay someone loads of money when you can…

The peril is already there. It's not created by those who leave. It's created by those who setup the conditions in such a way that all the people with self-respect leave. And this is how it should be: people should absolutely NOT feed a bad system. If all the best people leave, it sends a very clear signal. A lot of abuse and exploitation specifically happens because the best people are often too caring and good natured to leave.

If this is what we setup, we absolutely deserve to lose scientific progress over it. Then, perhaps we'll learn, figure it out, and set it up right. Expecting people to sacrifice themselves for the greater good while they're being exploited is both foolish and immoral.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#70

Post by projektir »

cshimmin wrote: post #17
yomly wrote: post #13

The problem with academic science is threefold: 1: you are expected to feel privileged for doing something you vaguely enjoy. (how many people actually enjoy running columns and NMRs at 12am?) 2: you are expected to be altruistic in your ambitions. Curse those vaguely better paid lizard people who are working in industry to forward some profiteering enterprise rather than "science" 3: there are huge barriers to entry…

1. That's like saying you couldn't possibly be passionate about cooking a big fancy meal because nobody really enjoys doing the dishes afterwards. If you're not passionate enough about chemistry/cooking to run NMR/do dishes, you're in the wrong place anyways. So you shouldn't worry about "feeling privileged", you should just do yourself a favor and get out. 2. Many forms of basic science cannot be done in industry. T…

1. We have lots of discussions in other places about how passion may not be all that valuable. There are people who are very well suited towards a field but not terribly passionate. What exactly justifies this obsession with passion? Is it about passion being necessary, or are passionate people just that much easier to exploit?

2. I'm sure they said that about rocket science, too. Of course, SpaceX is repeating all the same mistakes that academia is so perhaps it will go the same way.

Science shouldn't be done privately but if academia keeps messing up like this it will eventually move there if anyone cares about it.

> Also a lot of people you find in the sciences simply aren't that motivated by money.

It doesn't matter what people think they're motivated by. This is a capitalist economy. If you don't care about money, then you don't care about the reality you live in, and, sadly, that's true for a lot of day-dreamy scientists. How money flows is important, and people being exploited is a form of malfunction of such an economy that should always be mitigated.

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