91–100 of 212 posts
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Can the institutions be blamed for trying to stay afloat? Where is this money coming from to pay the scientists? A collective decision has to be made to keep science healthy in a meaningful and productive way. I think academia (through its ethos of critical approach and peer review) may be the single social structure that keeps some kind of sanity.
Academic research is funded by grants.
Academia places unrealistic goals on brilliant people and pays them so meagerly that they have to often find other sources of income. On top of this, some of the advisors are outright unbearable with their demands and work expectations, the world seems bleak for even a motivated researcher. Amidst the scarcity of grants, measly pay, extremely competitive environment, uncertainties tied with job market, failures in ex…
Self-awareness is good but less impressive when they're still charging universities obscene amounts to access material the journal obtained basically for free.
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I've heard a lot of complaints from a lot of different people working in lab science (in my case, my interest was in bio & chem) and none of them were about "tightly walled journals" (working academic researchers generally have institutional access, and when the logins are annoying to manage they just sci-hub like everyone else) or IRBs. Rather, it was very basic stuff, like being told to come in at 5:30AM to feed a…
I don't really speak out of concern of the well being of those in research, but for the health of the system as a whole. The fact it's a monster that eats people alive to me is an evidence that the whole thing needs to be torn down and replaced, which is the best way to erase all these sorts of harms. But this isn't about today's scientists. I fully expect a collapse of academia to harm anyone currently in it, becaus…
It is easy to tear down but hard to build.
I get that you are jaded, but tearing down institutional science is just going to harm future scientists by robbing them of opportunity. Yes the system isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean we have to throw it in the trash in its entirety.
Academia places unrealistic goals on brilliant people and pays them so meagerly that they have to often find other sources of income. On top of this, some of the advisors are outright unbearable with their demands and work expectations, the world seems bleak for even a motivated researcher. Amidst the scarcity of grants, measly pay, extremely competitive environment, uncertainties tied with job market, failures in ex…
And ofcourse the Titans of social media - zuckerberg, chamath, tiktok and 1000s of engineers, PMs will not pay for the harm their engineered products have caused because waters have been muddied enough and no true accounting of the harm can happen.
It is kind of like inventing a new synthetic highly addictive drug which is technically legal but very harmful and you can sell it to everyone.
Academia places unrealistic goals on brilliant people and pays them so meagerly that they have to often find other sources of income. On top of this, some of the advisors are outright unbearable with their demands and work expectations, the world seems bleak for even a motivated researcher. Amidst the scarcity of grants, measly pay, extremely competitive environment, uncertainties tied with job market, failures in ex…
Part of what contributes to this is the "brainwashing" that takes place in PhD programs that discourages applicants from transitioning out of academia into "the industry". Academia has tons of extremely smart, hard-working individuals, most of whom would have excellent white collar careers with half the work and 2-10x the pay. There are a handful of academics who are truly built for working in academia and wouldn't b…
What I found interesting of this article is that most of it is also applicable to a many tech sector jobs. High pressure to deliver something (because we squeeze the last of people), hire-and-fire practices everywhere, politics and toxic environments (because that is what people do and what is the current social perspective on what is okay). Developers, like scientists, are very outcome driven (number of lines, numbe…
Having now two lab scientists living under my roof, there is nothing even in the stories I've heard of the video game industry that compares to how toxic research culture is. It is next-level, as if being vexatious was a goal on its own --- which, given the culture generation after generation of PIs have come up through, might at this point actually be the case: students and employees are threatened, berated, harasse…
…at some labs. There’re many-many places with good PIs, decent funding, retreats, events, etc. I don’t get why people paint it as black and white.
A part of this is that in academia there are often few positive career rewards. You're under pressure to publish frequently, in high impact factor journals, and that is to keep your job. You don't get pay rises or bonuses, or any other career improvements, and job security can be until your next contract, at best. If you don't make it to tenured professor, and have good grant funding, then you are staring down the ba…
The problem is the gatekeepers such as journal corps profit from the artificial scarcity they create. There's no reason for them to only publish a certain number of "papers" in the paperless world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard a lot of complaints from a lot of different people working in lab science (in my case, my interest was in bio & chem) and none of them were about "tightly walled journals" (working academic researchers generally have institutional access, and when the logins are annoying to manage they just sci-hub like everyone else) or IRBs. Rather, it was very basic stuff, like being told to come in at 5:30AM to feed a…
I don't really speak out of concern of the well being of those in research, but for the health of the system as a whole. The fact it's a monster that eats people alive to me is an evidence that the whole thing needs to be torn down and replaced, which is the best way to erase all these sorts of harms. But this isn't about today's scientists. I fully expect a collapse of academia to harm anyone currently in it, becaus…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment has everything to do with the article, but unfortunately, the "it has nothing to do with the article" is one of the issues with Science. To keep my argumentation on topic: Historically, scientists never had a so safe life like today. In the past, scientists used to put their life at stake. Galileo, Copernicus, Turin, Einstein..
Yes, yes, one of the great challenges of modern science is that we're not murdering the scientists anymore.
I hope that's not how you really understood it and you are just reducing the discussion to a childish level to try to get some points...