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

Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

chemistry-blog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 94 posts

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#71

Post by simonh »

imjustsaying wrote: post #37
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"

Shanghai is completely different from the rest of China. Comparing Shanghai education to US education is like comparing the best school district in the US to the average school district of China. As with many things the communists parade around, you will be shown the front gates, but you won't be shown anything past it lest you realize you're seeing the facade of a movie set.

Parents paying for their children to get additional lessons to get an educational advantage isn't something you'll see 'communists parading around'. In fact the article makes it clear that the official position is that kindergarten teaching should be low pressure and using cramming classes is discouraged.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#72

Post by superuser2 »

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 theatre

It is the lowest tier of theater which demands the greatest sacrifices, because it can, because the people making it are desperate for work. The budgets are also smaller, so more responsibility is heaped onto smaller crews.

The best people get to work with the best theater companies, which have the best working conditions. They have to, or the best people would not work with them. This is often but not always formalized with a union contract.

Top theaters are usually union houses. The actors and stage managers belong to Equity, the crew to IATSE, the designers to United Scenic Artists, etc. In most cases, getting your union card is synonymous with making it into the "big leagues." On union shows, breaks, working hours per day, advance notice required for a call, which tasks can be assigned to people with specific positions, etc. are strictly regulated. Your work is held to an extremely high standard, but the hours in which you are expected to perform it, and the kinds of things that can be made your problem, are strictly bounded.

At higher levels, staffs are larger and more specialized: roles that would have been solo in a lower-budget world are a principal and several assistants on Broadway. Tasks that would have fallen to you by default have dedicated personnel, and you may in fact be expressly forbidden from doing them by the union contract.

There is immense upward pressure on the quality of your work because most engagements are short-term. Even if it's very hard to get fired, you still need to cultivate a network that is impressed by and likes you if you want to keep working.

The theater community, particularly at the top, has an admirably low tolerance for this kind of abuse.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#73

Post by johncolanduoni »

projektir wrote: post #65
cshimmin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

> 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.

You're thinking of bleeding edge as "new drug that at least shows up in some pop-sci stuff". People working in labs come up with new methods of doing X in situation Y all the time because X and Y can both be crazy specific to a certain line of inquiry. A thousand of those lines of inquiry will likely be explored before anyone outside of their extremely specific area of study notices. Your sampling bias is pretty irrelevant to the process.

As a concrete example, maybe you need to apply a novel algorithm to a high frequency data source (e.g. a single photon counting module). So you need to program an FPGA with a deserializer to do the processing (in lieu of wasting money on a DAQ that can pump data into your computer at a few GHz sampling rate), and only one postdoc understands the algorithm and FPGAs well enough to do it. Does that sound like a crazy, unusual, made-up scenario?

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

Have you seen how hard it is for startups that actually work on bleeding-edge scientific work to take off? Is that not something that Y-Combinator (for example) has specifically been looking for a more hybridized model for? Most research done at university is a very risky bet even for startups, especially if you want not just a result but a marketable result.

Want some concrete examples of the system working? Take a look at the envelope that quantum information research has pushed in the last 5 years. On the theoretical computer science side, you've got people like Scott Aronson answering significant open questions at a dizzying rate (read his blog for some basic, well-explained evidence). Meanwhile you've got groups like Martinis'[1] making the first quantum computer that can accurately simulate a different quantum system. All with a huge amount of collaboration in a social network of scientists that spans the globe.

Where's your evidence that startups are the hammer-screwdriver-impact-driver combo that solves all of humanity's intellectual problems with but one institution? Because that's a much stronger claim than "academia does moonshot research that wouldn't get done otherwise and its not the scientific equivalent of another day another CRUD app".

[1]: http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~martinisgroup/publications.shtm...

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#74

Post by pmoriarty »

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…

"The enzyme assay has to get done after you prep, and the prep is an 8 hour block of time after your cells are ready, and you have to do 10 hours of enzyme kinetic work... So you stay up all night."

I don't get it. Why can't this be done by multiple people in 8 hour shifts?

The medical profession is also pretty insane for making its residents work crazy hours and get almost no sleep for 24, 36, or even more hours a shift. It never made sense to me, especially as these people are risking their and other people's lives by going without sleep for so long.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#75

Post by pmoriarty »

jostmey wrote: post #30
Retric wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Won't happen while labor is cheap

It will if people start going to jail.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#76

Post by pmoriarty »

anbende wrote: post #60
WhoBeI wrote: post #52

Isn't this involuntary servitude? That's how I see it anyways. Whenever you are expected, and in this case required, to work against your will and for, I'm assuming, no pay under the threat of losing your livelihood it's involuntary servitude. Maybe I'm wrong about the "no pay" but even then I would still consider it involuntary.

Except that it is in no way involuntary. It's never against your will, and its generally not for no pay. It's just long hours for low pay. It's hard to see what you mean by involuntary here. It's a work for education arrangement, and the amount of work is large, but people are free to leave. It's a bad deal in a bad system, but its hardly involuntary.

There's another term for it: wage slavery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#77

Post by throw_away_777 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #74
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…

"The enzyme assay has to get done after you prep, and the prep is an 8 hour block of time after your cells are ready, and you have to do 10 hours of enzyme kinetic work... So you stay up all night." I don't get it. Why can't this be done by multiple people in 8 hour shifts? The medical profession is also pretty insane for making its residents work crazy hours and get almost no sleep for 24, 36, or even more hours a s…

Of course it can (and should) be done by multiple people, but there is an essentially unlimited supply of postdocs and graduate students from China and India who are willing to work long hours. A graduate student salary is peanuts for a US citizen compared to industry, not so for someone from a third-world country. This isn't hyperbole - more than half of the graduate students at my University were not born in the US. Graduate students 3-4 years into their PhD face tremendous pressure not to quit, and you usually make the decision to go into graduate school very early in your career.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#78

Post by ken47 »

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.

Why are you assuming that the goal of the regimen is to produce Nobel Prizes?

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#79

Post by throw_away_777 »

projektir wrote: post #64
sseagull wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People get paid for work they do that generates profit for the people paying them to do the work. Science, by its very nature, benefits society as a whole as opposed to the people who pay for the science. Patents are designed to correct this somewhat, but often aren't really enforceable. Most companies also don't have the lifetime to benefit from long-term moon-shot projects. When companies do promote science, they usually have a monopoly (for example Bell Labs).

Also, the supply-side of the equation is very important. There are plenty of people willing to be graduate students and post-docs for low pay, so they won't get paid much even if the work they do is important. This is made worse by the huge number of foreign workers who are willing to work for peanuts as postdocs and graduate students, see: https://psmag.com/the-real-science-gap-f00edae57ba1#.pbo4crt....

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#80

Post by throw_away_777 »

projektir wrote: post #70
cshimmin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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.

This isn't really true - there are things other than money that are important, like happiness. A graduate student in the sciences gets paid enough to live on, and enjoys a good amount of job security. The work is for a good cause, and despite all the complaining most graduate students. You are pretty unlikely to get fired as a graduate student. A postdoc is a much worse job, I don't think anyone should take a postdoc unless they really don't have any other options (or are from a third-world country). With that said, when I started my PhD I didn't care about low pay, but later on this was no longer true, and having just finished a PhD if I could go back in time I would not do it again.

Post reply on HN