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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

#91

Post by ModernMech »

mjburgess wrote: post #77
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' re…

Unfortunately universities are not immune to the realities of living in a capitalistic society. Money needs to be made, growth needs to be demonstrated, debts need to be paid, and for that grants need to come in. People recognize that unprofitable research is necessary, but no one wants to fund it. And event when by some miracle it does get funded, people complain loudly and mock it ruthlessly. Sometimes the institution stays strong, sometimes it buckles under the pressure.

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

#92

Post by godelski »

Kye wrote: post #46
thelittlenag wrote: post #32

My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab, and by extension the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Getting approved for the money via the grant process means having published "interesting" re…

Was it always like this or headed here? I'm curious if flat government funding for research against rising costs creates or amplifies counterproductive incentives.

A little of both. The problem is that evaluation of research work is insanely difficult. A lot of people think it's easy because "the world is objective, it either works or doesn't" but research is cutting edge and you're only chipping away at a much larger picture. It can take decades for a work to reveal itself as truly profound or utter shit. The problem, which I rant about in a longer comment, is that instead of acknowledging the noise we've embraced poor metrics and encouraged the hacking of those metrics. I call this Goodhart's Hell. People forget, metrics are models and all models are wrong. You have to constantly be questioning your metrics and determine how well aligned they are with your goals or else you'll drift (the environment moves, so your metric must move too).

I think actually the better way to solve this, which may seem paradoxical, is to actually increase funding. Not in size of single prizes for grants (well... we need that too, but that's another discussion), but in the availability. The reason being that the hacking is partially encouraged by the competition for a very scarce resource. A resource that compounds. Due to this (and some nuances, see other post) we're not actually rewarding those who perform the best work (we may actually be discouraging that) but those who become lucky. A "good work" is simply one with high citation counts, which is heavily weighted on the publicity around that work. Which is why top universities have big media departments, pay news publishers to advertise their works, and why survey papers generate huge counts.

The problem is that the system is rather complex and there are no simple or "obvious" solutions. "Good enough" is also not clear because too low order of an approximation can actually take you away from your intended goals, not a small step towards as one might think.

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

#93

Post by omginternets »

bluGill wrote: post #76
omginternets wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Yes, and the classical solution was to deny those people tenure. The system worked pretty well, for a large institutional system, until roughly the early 90's.

What we have now is an impossibly high standard that prevents well-motivated researchers from accomplishing the very goals that the institution is meant to serve.

Edit: now do me a favor and analyze whether university administrators have a track-record of using funds with prudence.

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

#94

Post by stavros »

exmadscientist wrote: post #56
thelittlenag wrote: post #32

My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab, and by extension the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Getting approved for the money via the grant process means having published "interesting" re…

> the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets) Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants). So the University helpfully launders the…

I don't understand this comment. So basically, I have a bunch of dirty money, I give it to a university, who then use all of it to buy a bunch of stuff that my own company sells, thus cleaning the money? So basically what I've done is I've given away $X million of stuff, and my company gets its 5% margin out of it?

This makes zero sense to me.

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

#95

Post by 5kg »

shrubble wrote: post #37

Reminder that: 1) Ken Iverson who invented the APL programming language and went on to win the Turing Award in 1979, had already published 'that one little book' that was considered insufficient for tenure, but which formed the basis for the award. 2) tubes remained the main focus of MIT faculty for quite some years after the transistor was invented. It was Robert Noyce and the people he worked with at Grinnell Colle…

3) Stephen Cook was denied tenure position at UCB: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Cook

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

#96

Post by kaashif »

przemub wrote: post #54
rawgabbit wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah yeah, the allowed kind of racism. My favourite.

I don't think requiring everyone speak the same language is racism, necessarily. If it's "speak English to include everyone in work conversation" then it's fine. If it's "don't speak Hungarian on the phone to your parents because fuck you" then no, that's bad.

I have worked in environments where teammates speak in their native language (spoken by a small minority of people at the company) and it has an exclusionary effect. Once a team (perhaps unintentionally) begins to favour those with the right native language, and a critical mass of speakers is reached, it can sometimes result in mono lingual, mono cultural teams who find it hard to hire or retain other people.

It really depends on the specific criticism and how it was phrased.

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

#97

Post by PheonixPharts »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #85
thelittlenag wrote: post #32

My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab, and by extension the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Getting approved for the money via the grant process means having published "interesting" re…

I'm sick of lies and misrepresentations from people who clearly don't know what they're talking about, talking like schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money. First off: grants from most places factor in the administrative overhead. That is negotiated between the school and the grant org. For the NIH, it averages fifty percent. The school/university is very restricted in what they can…

Regarding your first point, was the parent comment edited or did you miss this part as they clearly address this issue:

> (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets).

Parent comment isn't making the claim that "schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money."

Rather bemoaning the fact that academic success (and even entry into the field at all) is very, very closely tied to the ability to generate revenue and more so the corollary that quality of research performed always at best takes a back seat, or at worst becomes a liability if it gets in the way of bringing in more money.

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

#98

Post by lostlogin »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #86
exmadscientist wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets) Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants). So the University helpfully launders the…

So, if you're complaining about this in an HN comment, that means you reported it to the NIH, right? Because "kickbacks" are not a common thing, friend.

You don’t think so?

It sounds like something that would happen. Where I was there were complex arrangements to avoid breaking grant rules while also spending every last cent.

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

#99

Post by godelski »

thelittlenag wrote: post #32

My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab, and by extension the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Getting approved for the money via the grant process means having published "interesting" re…

> Quality is an after thought taken care of __by what passes for peer review__.

I can feel the strong disdain in these words that can only be expressed by someone close to the academic world. I've honestly decided to just stop using the phrase all together because it's just a misnomer and not meaningful at this point other than a metrics for the bureaucrats.

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

#100

Post by exmadscientist »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #86
exmadscientist wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets) Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants). So the University helpfully launders the…

So, if you're complaining about this in an HN comment, that means you reported it to the NIH, right? Because "kickbacks" are not a common thing, friend.

This behavior is known to all parties. It's openly advertised and discussed by the admin office people.
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