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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

#71

Post by vkou »

wrycoder wrote: post #23
bell-cot wrote: post #8

Well...yes. Treating the actual high-value workers like sh*t has been American Academia's SOP for how many years now?

I read yesterday that there are now more administrators than students at Harvard, but ‘only’ one third as many teachers as students.

Harvard is at 19,000 employees for 23,000 students - but I'd be surprised if most of the employees are administrators, as this includes the plumbers, the janitors, the gardeners, the campus cops, the cooks, etc, etc.

My, uh, no-name school somehow managed to educate ~37,000 students with a 'mere' 7,200 employees (half of them part-time).

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

#73

Post by queuebert »

Etheryte wrote: post #33
queuebert wrote: post #12

Academia does not value quality, but quantity. It selects for scientists who are the best at marketing and networking, not necessarily doing quality science, though they can also be. I have no idea how to fix this, but competition needs to be reduced, probably by more guaranteed funding for positions, not just projects, as grants are. This latest military aid package is 2x the entire NIH budget, so surely there is mo…

While I see where you're coming from, I'm very conflicted on your approach to address this. I don't think throwing more money at the problem fixes the underlying issues, if anything, I would expect them to deepen. There was an article making the rounds some time ago on HN how something like three quarters of medical studies had either strong data analysis errors in them or had complete bogus data, to the point where…

If the desire to inflate results comes from the intense competition, not incompetence, then more money would fix it. The fact that the top universities are suffering big fake research scandals would bolster this. Personally I've known many competent scientists who left for greener pastures not because they couldn't cut it but because they wanted higher pay and less stress.

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

#74

Post by skulk »

rawgabbit wrote: post #41
wavemode wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

woman, uncool topic... is the third factor of the trifecta "scientist"? or "brilliant"?

She was admonished for speaking in her native Hungarian. In any organization, there are the publicized metrics and rules. And then there are the hidden rules which are nothing more than office politics. Do I expect UPenn to change its behavior? I would not hold my breath. The real question is why we hold Ivy League universities on a pedestal.

The real question has a real simple answer: Ivy leagues and equivalents are how the ruling class grooms its next generation. We put them on a pedestal because being part of the ruling class comes with benefits.

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

#75

Post by mjburgess »

tverbeure wrote: post #50
m_a_g wrote: post #3

This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles.

It's not just academia. A friend of mine was involved in the development of a ground breaking medicine for a pretty common incurable disease. The results of the first and second round trials were fantastic, giving a significant number of patients a normal quality of life that they hadn't experienced in years. The formula was sold to a big pharma company that completely botched the third round trial. It's not that har…

I think you're overgenealising a bit here. There are significant incentives on the pharam company to get it right, but they didnt. In a sense, life happens -- it seems this is an accident.

Whereas the issue here is that against any reasonable objective of publicly research, academia has institutionalised a series of dysfunctional incentives.

ie., the "Accident" is the norm

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

#76

Post by bluGill »

omginternets wrote: post #43
m_a_g wrote: post #3

This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles.

I'd go out on a limb to say "likely many", especially since this is a rather new phenomenon. This is yet another example of bean-counters being at the helm: in their pursuit for productivity (narrowly defined as "impact factor"), they have undermined the very conditions that favor meaningful discovery. These essentially boil down to: the ability for research faculty to make long-term, risky bets. What the bean-counte…

> What the bean-counter class can't seem to understand is that researchers are motivated to make big discoveries, so you can actually trust them to be judicious in their use of resources.

What you don't seem to understand is there are some who are not motivated by that.

Note that I make no claims as to how many are honest/dishonest. This is a valid thing that "bean counters" often miss.

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

#77

Post by mjburgess »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #57

Unpopular opinion, but this was a reasonable outcome from the university. If a researcher makes a great discovery, but can’t get funding to do anything with it, You don’t keep them around not making progress. They got pushed out, found funding, and finally furthered the technology. It is unclear if more scientific progress would have been made if they were kept at penn without funding.

You have summarised the incentives. You've yet to defend them.

Presumably the point of research is that it's not commercially viable at this stage; were it, the market would already address this need.

Why bother with a university research system which 'lives or dies' just as start ups do? We already have those.

It is widely recognised that there needs to be a long (perhaps millenia-long) pipeline of 'unprofitable' research into commerical outlets. Who thought playing around with wires and magents would lead anywhere?

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

#78

Post by raincom »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #69
raincom wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This tells us that too many people chase these jobs. Maybe, time to hire as many as possible using basic income scheme.

The people who seek professorships aren't motivated by money, they're motivated by prestige and tenure. If they wanted money, they'd have gone directly into the private sector. But: there just aren't enough professorships to support the amount of PhDs we mint every year. This is causes people to go off and postdoc for years hoping somewhere will accept them. Through a combination of luck and skill, some get a job as…

In a way, this explains why many international Ph.Ds go back to their home countries these days to join local universities. It is good for these countries.

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

#79

Post by d--b »

Well the fact is that she remained at Penn for 30+ years, so clearly it couldn't be that horrible. And there she made some groundbreaking discoveries that contributed to the COVID vaccine and she got a Nobel Prize, so she probably did get some people behind her.

University politics are terrible, but in this very case, whatever happened, it turned out pretty good for both her and the University.

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

#80

Post by rawgabbit »

fsh wrote: post #63
rawgabbit wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that may be true today, in the research sciences — there should be some kind of middle ground. Thomas Edison may have been a giant of self promotion. But I would argue Nikola Tesla invented as much or more foundationally important technology we use today. I would argue Tesla like Kariko will never be a wiz at self promotion. But a domain expert should have spotted them early on. I mean isn’t that the job of peo…

I think you got this backwards. Tesla made a few important inventions early on and then spent the rest of his life showing off big sparks and scamming investors. Edison's labs were far more influential.

Sorry I did get it backwards.
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