

Why You Don't “Fucking Love Science” - denzil_correa
http://www.johnskylar.com/post/61507282912/why-you-dont-fucking-love-science

======
dnautics
"I’m not trying to talk down to those professions; they’re all vital and
should be well-paid, but a postdoctoral scientist has tons of training, and
that should come with a boost in salary."

But.. That's part of the reason why scientists aren't paid very much. By and
large, their work is not vital, and by most people's admissions much of "basic
science" won't amount to much - but you never know till 10, 50, 100 years down
the line. Now. Let's say one out of ten basic science projects becomes
relevant (an overestimate, if you ask me as a PhD biologist)... And let's say
a postdoc gets paid 60,000. Then the cost of that postdoc corrected for
"likelihood of usefulness" is 600,000.

The other part is that we are willing to work for beans.

edit: I just realized I'm a postdoc and I'm not getting paid nearly close to
60k.

------
Yhippa
I'll just leave this right here (NSFW)...

[http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=youre_not_a_nerd](http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=youre_not_a_nerd)

~~~
zalew
what's nsfw there?

~~~
Dewie
Maddox.

------
alecbenzer
> a postdoctoral scientist has tons of training, and that should come with a
> boost in salary

Labor theory of value? Just because you spent time acquiring skills doesn't
mean that others value those skills enough to pay you for utilizing them.

~~~
jofer
The listed postdoc salary is the same for fields where you have very
applicable skills that industry is very willing to pay you 6 figures for.

~~~
alecbenzer
Ok? What's ultimately valuable then is the things you can do with those
skills, not the skills themselves. If you take the same skills and do things
with them that others care less about, you'll be paid less.

~~~
denzil_correa
> If you take the same skills and do things with them that others care less
> about, you'll be paid less.

The point is that if even if you do exactly the same thing and are a post
doctoral researcher in an industrial lab; you will earn more than what you
would do with the same execution in academics.

~~~
alecbenzer
If you're really doing the exact same thing, then why not just move to an
industrial lab -- problem solved? Presumably there's a reason some people want
to stay in academia, which seems to imply they're doing something different
there?

------
Finster
It's fairly obvious that the author knows next to nothing about military
research, or even how much engineering goes into modern industry, defense or
otherwise.

A lot more goes on than just "researching things that kill people." The Joint
Strike Fighter, for example, is a sophisticated, state-of-the-art aeronautics
platform. Advances discovered while working on it can end up applying to
everything from advanced crypto to materials science to acoustics research.

Also, let's conveniently ignore the fact that defense research spending dwarfs
the NASA budget by an order of magnitude, and has potential to be just as
important to "science" as a whole.

~~~
kiba
Indeed, we won't know what advances defense spending will yields 50 to 100
years down the road. However, it is also true that we don't know what basic
science research will yield 50 years to 100 years down the road, and I rather
human spend money on space exploration rather than trying to find better way
to kill things.

~~~
dnautics
Would you feel better if you knew DARPA was spending money on pie in the sky
ways of killing things if "things" was bacteria and viruses?

~~~
Arnor
Maybe if "things" were mosquitos...

------
lutusp
I'm getting a bit tired of articles that offer to explain science but don't
mention falsifiability or reality testing.

> Science is people.

Spectacularly false. Science's primary obstacle, its single most important
handicap, is people. In fact, the reason science exists at all is to
compensate for how badly people test reality. Science is a kind of
intellectual crutch so that people who cannot think, can at least assume a
roughly upright posture in the world of ideas, maybe even stand "on the
shoulders of giants".

I look forward to a time (in the far future) when what we call "science" will
be a normal way to think about the world, rather than a special discipline
representing a dramatic contrast to the majority of human behavior.

------
tehwalrus
The wikipedia article of the 23-4 year old girl who set up the facebook group
that he's taking the piss out of:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elise_Andrew](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elise_Andrew)

she has a BSc, and most certainly _does_ understand that science is not just
pretty/cool pictures - the site is just where she puts the ones she finds.

------
diminoten
This article is utter and complete bullshit.

First of all, data _is_ science just as much as people are, it's an arbitrary
line to draw that puts people in science and data out of science. It's not a
"side process", it's the critical piece. Computers can do science, but science
can't happen without data.

Secondly, the "if you love it, support it" argument is also utter bullshit. I
love rain, but I'm not actively seeding clouds because I'm not a huge fucking
asshole who doesn't give a shit what impact my seeding might have on the
environment. I also have to do other things with my time so when it does rain
I can enjoy it. If I didn't work, and was therefore homeless, I'd enjoy rain a
whole hell of a lot less.

Thirdly, people love more than one thing. I, for example, love woman's rights
too, as well as net neutrality, the free market, and a number of other things.
People who love science also love other things, and when we vote, we don't
just consider one single issue (science funding). Oh, and by the fucking way,
my country spends the most money by a _wide_ margin, on science funding [0].

So to sum, you might have a point if you want to talk about how little money
researchers get paid. But don't play games with telling me what I like and
don't like, because you have no fucking clue what you're talking about in that
arena, and it just ruins any legitimate point you might have.

[0] -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_research_a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_research_and_development_spending)

~~~
lutusp
> First of all, data is science just as much as people are ...

False choice. Science is neither data nor people, it's what we do with the
data. Data by itself is nothing without a falsifiable theory that tries to
explain the data.

How hard is it to say that science is disciplined reality-testing, and if
reality disagrees with your theory, you must abandon the theory?

------
beambot
To each their own. I experienced the PhD-postdoc path. IMO...

\-- Science is the quest to understand how and why things work, and how to
make 'em better (for engineering). Sure, some of it is "process", but not
"process and people" (to me, though the people are good too).

\-- Academic science definitely has a profit motive: get money to do more
science.

\-- Academic "workhorses" get paid $40k because they're either in training
(grad student) or in a holding pattern (postdocs) and looking for the "right"
long-term gig.

\-- Biological sciences have perverse career trajectories compared to others
in STEM. I still can't believe that you need multiple 5-year postdocs to be
(truly) eligible for faculty jobs. Probably some supply-demand things going on
there.

\-- My gut tells me... People in science who bitch about others' motivations
are just projecting their own unhappiness. You can love science and its beauty
without committing your life to it.

------
hvs
Or you could stop relying on the government -- who is broke, mind you -- to
fund your livelihood.

~~~
jofer
The problem is that corporations simply aren't going to fund pure research.

Part of the role of government is to fund research that may not pay off for 20
years, or 50 years, or a century.

Corporations do indeed do a large amount of R&D, but it's much more focused,
and needs to impact the bottom line on a much shorter timeframe (say ~5
years).

Because of this, there's a large amount of very important research that will
never be funded by anything other than a quasi-governmental organization.

~~~
dnautics
> corporations simply aren't going to fund pure research.

Not all corporations are for-profit.

> Part of the role of government is to fund research that may not pay off for
> 20 years, or 50 years, or a century.

What? Can you point to me where it says that?

~~~
jofer
To be fair, I guess that's partly my political leanings showing through.

Who else will fund it, though?

As far as the non-profit angle, that's what I was implying by quasi in "quasi-
governmental". I definitely could have worded that better, though.

~~~
dnautics
there are plenty of non-profit, non-governmental scientific efforts. SETI
(yes, it piggybacked on some government instruments) is the best well-known
one. Peter Mitchell came up with the pure "basic-science" chemiosmotic theory,
founded a nonprofit research institute (Glyn Research Ltd
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell))
to prove and validate it. He subsequently won the nobel prize for his efforts.

HHMI also does this at its in-house Janelia Farms campus.

Not basic science, but Salk and Sabin developed the polio vaccines without
much federal help (via march of dimes, a nonprofit) - and didn't even patent
their vaccines.

Much basic science in the pre-1940 era was funded internally by the research
institutes they were at.

And there are basic science foundations that get the patronage of industry,
just because, they're so gosh derned nice, and some that do limited basic
science on the side while doing applied that passes patents onto the for-
profit (lucent/bell labs, Xerox PARC).

~~~
akgerber
Bell Labs and PARC both are from a long-gone era where high tax rates meant
the government would tax away high dividends or executive pay, which made
empire building more appealing:
[http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/07/24/xerox_parc_an...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/07/24/xerox_parc_and_bell_labs_brought_to_you_by_high_taxes.html)

~~~
dnautics
All the same, I'd rather have a more distributed, private, independent basic
science effort. But then again, I'm biased, as that's what my nonprofit is
trying to do.

------
ameoba
The big graph in the middle, which drives the argument that you're somebody's
bitch for two decades as a postdoc before making it on your own is driven by
NIH data. How is the situation for other fields of research & sources of
funding?

Looking as the total US DoD budget, as they're winding down from 2 foreign
wars is a non sequitur when talking about research funding. Just looking at
federal R&D funding (
[http://www.proposalexponent.com/federalprofiles.html](http://www.proposalexponent.com/federalprofiles.html)
) things are going strong - even DoD funding is well above Cold War Levels.

Anecdotally, of the people I remember from grad school, most of them moved on
from post-doc work after 3-4 years. While not the same as becoming PI for a
large grant, there's a pretty big gap between 4 and 20 years.

While it's not a career that you'll get obscenely rich pursuing, it's nowhere
near the level of lifelong poverty that the article is suggesting. Once you
consider the excellent retirement benefits, work environment and unparalleled
stability of a tenured position, it's a comfortable life. It's not for
everyone but there's no reason to avoid it.

------
NovemberWest
My ex was career military. People in the military bitch constantly about the
"low pay" while oblivious to the dollar value of a long list of benefits. I
wonder how those high civilian salaries compare to the academic salaries if
you figure out benefits. I am not seeing any reason to believe this is an
apples to apples comparison.

~~~
jofer
My benefits (in terms of health care, pension, 401k, etc) in industry are
_substantially_ better in industry than they would have been in academia.
Industry has both better benefits and higher salary and shorter working hours.

Academia has flexibility and challenge (and politics, to be fair). Despite all
of the downsides, I miss it.

~~~
NovemberWest
Have an upvote, though I would say flexiblty and challenge are real benefits
and it would be possible to calculate a dollar value for them if you knew the
right data to look for.

------
dnautics
if you really love science, you'll donate out of your own pocket to science
research nonprofits.

OK, that's a bit of a self-serving statement =)

------
kurtismorrison
An engaging post but this one kind of lost me.

First, what does defense spending have to do with whether or not I love
science, or how much money should be invested in science? That's like saying:

"You don't love bread. You spend half as much money on bread as you do on
cheese." Huh?

Also, I was a bit annoyed by the argument that researchers deserve more money
because they spent a lot of time acquiring their skills. If I take 10 years
learning how to bake a cake, the cake is still only worth 5 or 10 bucks.

One could argue that researchers are paid too little based on the value they
create because of some kind of market failure. That would certainly be an
interesting read.

~~~
rincewind
Your Cake metaphor breaks down because of your intuition and experience of
cakes. If _everybody_ needs to study for 10 years to bake a cake, cakes would
become are more expensive. If people are were willing to spend 5 bucks on a
cake, baking would not be a lucrative carer and few people would pursue it.
Politicians might then show concern about a cake talent crisis and fund
programs to get girls more interested in baking at an earlier age, while cakes
still cost 5 bucks a piece.

~~~
kurtismorrison
rincewind - not sure I understand your point.

"If everybody had to study for 10 years to bake a cake, cakes would become
more expensive"

This is not exactly true unless the demand for cakes is perfectly inelastic,
but I will admit that if the cost of becoming a cake supplier increases, total
supply should decrease (all else equal), the result will be a higher
equilibrium price. The point I was trying to make with the cake metaphor is
simply that the price of x is not determined by the cost of the inputs, but by
the value of the output.

The part of your comment that I don't understand is the bit about the
government support. I don't really see how that relates to the cake metaphor.
Am I missing something?

Also, you're describing a situation that can logically only arise in the
context of market failure (this is interesting because I alluded to this in my
first comment).

If people aren't willing to pay the higher cost of the cake because the
benefit doesn't justify the cost, why would it make sense for the government
to use tax money to intervene?

Short answer: it doesn't.

This only makes sense if the total benefit of cake > the cost of the cake, but
there was some market inefficiency in the way.

You could certainly argue that this is the case with scientific research. In
fact I personally would agree with this argument. But it has nothing to do
with how long the scientist spent in school and what they "deserve" to earn
based on that education.

I really want some cake now.

~~~
rincewind
There are lots of programs to get girls more interested in science. The
Government _is_ intervening. Careers in science do not pay well.

[http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-
science](http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science)

------
RafiqM
IFLS promotes science by showing the data/results of science.

If you want to get someone interested in programming, do you start with
telling them about variables and loops? No, you show them a game or something
else cool that's been made via programming.

In a time when scientific work is severely under-appreciated and undervalued,
why is the author trying to undermine a resource that is doing more to promote
science than the whole school system combined?

~~~
dnautics
>under-appreciated and undervalued

that's your opinion... I respectfully disagree.

------
mildtrepidation
This starts off with the same mistake made by "why you're doing x wrong" or
"everything you know about y is wrong:" Talking down to the entire population
of the internet, i.e. anyone who might read your post.

Making uncharitable generalizations about people making uncharitable
generalizations about science makes you statistically likely to be interpreted
as a troll, and even if you aren't, you've earned that designation by failing
to appeal to _any_ demographic or make any reasonably qualified statements.

------
nether
> Stop liking what I don't like!

Did this really need an essay?

I'll "fucking love" whatever I want and define it however I wish. How does
this make you feel?

------
ianstallings
Here's some science for the author:
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/mind_brain/anger_management...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/mind_brain/anger_management/)

------
Dewie
> If you loved science, you’d be voting based on candidates who want to
> increase funding for it. You’d be making it an issue that actually gets
> debated in the media, that sees equal time with the wars we fight and the
> bills we pay our aging workforce. These other things are priorities too, but
> if you think that science comes after these things, you’re dead wrong:
> __science is the reason we’ve gotten so damned good at these things __.

...and the last part is what I think is the reason that there has developed a
subculture of people who "fucking love science". They don't mean that they
love the _scientific process_ _, but rather that they love_ the results that
science is giving*. But of course, if there wasn't such a subculture, someone
would make a blog post whining about how people aren't appreciative of the
science that is the corner stone of modern civilization.

~~~
dnautics
they may not even love the results that science is giving, they may love
showing off that they "like" science as a status symbol or social signifier.

~~~
Dewie
That might very well be the case. Of the friends of mine that like that page
on Facebook, most of them are either involved (or have been involved) with
science or technology.

