
An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia (2013) - otto_pankrock
http://crypto.junod.info/2013/09/09/an-aspiring-scientists-frustration-with-modern-day-academia-a-resignation/
======
vinceguidry
90% of everything is crap. And there's no guarantee that the other 10% isn't
crap as well. I get it, we need the social dialogue, so that people know how
and why it's crap, but really the only way forward that doesn't result in
eternal loss of control of your efforts to sociopaths with no interest in your
happiness or society's well-being is to blaze your own path forward.

Academia is crap. Most jobs are crap. Most people do not make any dents in the
universe. Most relationships end.

One should learn to recognize situations where irrationality is the norm. The
easy one to spot is music. Way more people want to be musicians than the
market for their output can bear. These market realities will dominate your
life if you decide to become a musician. Doesn't mean you can't make it, just
means that if you want a semblance of control over whether you'll make it or
not, you have to create that control yourself and you'll have nobody to help
you that can really help you because they have to deal with the market
realities too. Even if you do make it you'll be similarly powerless to change
the realities.

Once you understand the dynamic you will immediately see the pattern
everywhere. Film. Academia. Comedy. The Apple App Store. The dating market for
very attractive women. People who want me to work on their websites or
otherwise hire me. Silicon Valley. You have to deal with all the other
assholes in the world who want the same thing you want, and there's only so
much of it to go around. The ones that succeed learn how to increase the
demand for the services they want to provide. The ones that don't bitch about
how unfair everything is.

~~~
umutisik
Companies live or die by the value that they create for their customers. Films
win or lose by the entertainment they provide. Musicians get rich or stay poor
by the number of fans who enjoy their music etc. The post is saying that
people in academia (Except those at the top institutions) are not judged by
the value that they create for science and that this gets in the way of good
science in many institutions. Science is not the kind of market where the most
beneficial outcomes are automatically selected and the author is upset with
how incentives and low odds of success are aligned to make his life in science
anxious and unfulfilling. One can scold the author for complaining or one can
take him seriously on his points about how society should better benefit from
the money it spends on science.

~~~
mikeash
Your examples are about popularity, whereas with science you switch to value.
These are far from equivalent. Films win or lose by the entertainment they
provide, but do the best ones win? No, rather the ones that can convince the
most people to watch them win. It's quite possible that an unpopular movie
_would have_ provided a lot more entertainment if more people had gone to see
it, but since they didn't, it loses. Likewise with music: just because some
musician attracted a lot of fans doesn't mean those fans wouldn't enjoy some
obscure musician more, they just never really made the choice.

I think it's useful to ask whether science is actually different in this
respect, or whether this is merely an aspect of a universal problem.

------
sdenton4
This part gets best at why I jumped ship last year, at the end of my math
postdoc:

"(4) Academia: Where Originality Will Hurt You "The good, healthy mentality
would naturally be to work on research that we believe is important.
Unfortunately, most such research is challenging and difficult to publish, and
the current publish-or-perish system makes it difficult to put bread on the
table while working on problems that require at least ten years of labor
before you can report even the most preliminary results. [...] "Ideally, the
academic system would encourage those people who are already well established
and trusted to pursue these challenges, and I’m sure that some already do.
However, I cannot help but get the impression that the majority of us are
avoiding the real issues and pursuing minor, easy problems that we know can be
solved and published. The result is a gigantic literature full of
marginal/repetitive contributions. This, however, is not necessarily a bad
thing if it’s a good CV that you’re after."

I came away with the impression that there are a few people given extremely
wide latitude to work (or not) on problems of real significance, who had
generally been granted 'rock star' status by the math community in one way or
another. It's a 1% whose academic freedoms serves as a motivation for the
other 99%, who will try to write a bulk of irrelevant papers while dealing
with a massive teaching load. A job in industry ultimately felt like it might
provide more freedom in the long run than the academic track, with less danger
of ending up in a adjunct teaching gig in Wichita.

~~~
otoburb
>A job in industry ultimately felt like it might provide more freedom in the
long run than the academic track [...]

Does having a full-time industry job allow you to seriously pursue your own
research interests on the side?

For mathematics research especially, why don't more research-oriented
mathematicians pursue this dual path? I understand part-time research
necessarily implies a slower publication rate, but since you're already
eschewing this anyway, are there any other drawbacks? Two that spring to mind
are a restriction to travel to mathematics conferences and socializing with
mathematicians during the day -- are these big show stoppers?

~~~
AngrySkillzz
I've actually been playing with the idea of a "monastery" for mathematicians;
we could get a group of mathematicians together to live simply and cheaply
somewhere, subsisting on a small amount of savings and freeing up time to
study and solve problems.

~~~
nnq
I thought about something similar, but more like a "monastery-style research
institute" where people, with some amount of provable expertise, regardless of
credentials or previous publications, would be able to check-in for pre-
determined period of time and just do "open ended research" (the kind of
things no sane university or corporation would ever pay for...) and have
living expenses plus other basic needs provided, and spared from having to
waste energy in the meaningless and draining "dance" we call "social life",
for with the sole condition that their research is "open source" and that they
are actually staying there working, not just using it as a free/cheap rent.

The "monastery" could also be run as a business, having a for-profit section
developing products based on the ideas produced inside. Something like the
members of the monastery signing an agreement that they are ok with their
results being published with one year delay, time that would give an edge to
the monastery over any competitors that would also want to develop products
based on them - think of it like a "research monastery self-financed by
coupling with a sort of startup incubator" (with some really intransigent and
incorruptible people working to keep the two camps of people apart and to stop
the "business idea developers" from exploiting the "monks").

And for research fields that require some expensive equipment, like bio-
medical research, the "monastery" may make the "monks" sign contracts giving
the patents and other right to their discoveries to the monastery, in exchange
for having access to a lab where they can work on anything they want. It's not
that utopic since you can a pretty usable top notch molecular biology lab plus
an animal experiments facility for under $1M (probably not in the US because
you have too many regulations and stuff...) if you find alternative channels
of buying equipment of user other "hacks" that regular research institutes
can't use...

But it's the kind of idea that it's hard to convince other people it would
make sense... so for now I'll keep it on my list of to-dos for after I get
filthy rich so I can finance this myself.

~~~
noonespecial
That sounds a great deal like what Universities are supposed to be. (Or did I
miss the funny?)

------
jpwagner

      "I sometimes find it both funny and frightening that the majority 
      of the world’s academic research is actually being done by people 
      like me, who don’t even have a PhD degree. Many advisors, whom you 
      would expect to truly be pushing science forward with their decades 
      of experience, do surprisingly little and only appear to manage the 
      PhD students, who slave away on papers that their advisors then put 
      their names on as a sort of “fee” for having taken the time to read 
      the document..."
    

That's a bit like saying: "What's so great about Henry Ford? He didn't _build_
the damn cars."

It appears that the author's definition of "true science" is akin to
knowledge-that-needn't-be-effectively-communicated-to-anyone, which, in my
estimation, is not science at all.

~~~
grovulent
A lot of labs are very much like this... with the actual science work getting
done by the post-grads.

What the author doesn't realise that while the lab heads might not be doing a
lot of science on a day to day basis - most are overloaded with a bunch of
other stuff that is forced upon them... endless committee meetings, grant
writing, teaching and teaching administration etc...

~~~
tormeh
Can't all of that, except teaching, be done by a secretary?

~~~
marcosdumay
That'd require a secretary with a PhD. Looks more like most of it should not
be done. But then, I have no idea how to change it.

Teaching is probably the easiest one to solve. Some kinds of classes should be
attributed to teachers, not researchers (those are very different kinds of
expertize).

~~~
timelined
It is increasingly common for large labs in the life sciences (25+ members) to
hire multiple support staff (with PhDs) to help offset this load. This is in
addition to positions like Senior Research Scientists (senior postdocs) who
often serve as 50% "project managers" and 50% independent postdocs.

------
bkcooper
In the comments, Lee Smolin says something I agree with:

 _A final word: where ever you go if you leave science you are likely to face
the same fight, because it is in the nature of modern life and modern
organizations._

I've thought before that much of the criticism of academia (which I've
certainly engaged in) mostly reflects disappointment that it was ultimately
not all that different from the rest of the world.

~~~
jefb
My grad school stipend was ~$500 every two weeks pre-tax. I worked like crazy.
The football coach made ~250k. I now make over 5 times that.. after taxes.

When I left grad school I found many of it's problems present in the corporate
world; except that now, compensation is commiserate with responsibility.

~~~
bsder
Commensurate, not commiserate.

You commiserate (sympathize) with the author's plight. And now your
compensation is now commensurate (measurably equal) with your responsibility.

~~~
ky3
During my stint in the corporate world, my compensation was also commiserate
with my responsibility. How could you tell GP wasn't being both ironic and
Freudian?

~~~
bsder
Because I didn't think he was adjectiving a verb. :)

------
letitgo12345
As a current CS PhD, I feel there are elements of truth in the letter, on the
whole, it's a bit too dismissive of the value of academia.

Yes, a lot of research in academia ends up going nowhere, but that's not
always obvious beforehand. Research is an inherently chancy endeavour with a
low chance of success. But academia is still a source of important research.
To name just two examples, much of the major deep learning research which
everyone is jumping on these days was kept alive and done at universities. The
CRISPR/Cas9 breakthrough in biology was done at universities.

It is true that there is a huge pressure to publish which leads to a lot of
crap being published but that doesn't mean the academia is not valuable and it
seems like a hard problem to figure out the right incentives (which we should
of course work on). Maybe something that gives a weighted rank of the papers
would be better able to put value on the research you've done and make purely
the # of papers less of a unit of currency in the academia. Citations do that
to some extent but they're still not a great solution.

Egos are a huge problem, but that's true in every sphere. Academics are humans
too...

~~~
darkmighty
Yes, that's what's missing from this article: recognizing academics as humans
and not perfect idealistic beings.

To me criticisms like this need to at least suggest paths towards solutions.
If the system is already as good as it can reasonably work, how can we
criticize it?

It needed at least to suggest paths for researchers outside academia: will we
get more research done outside? Will it fit better those idealistic goals?

------
fsk
I was similarly frustrated when I left a Math PhD program.

I realized that my best-case outcome was probably a tenure-track job at a #100
ranked school, and my worst/likely-case outcome was being a permanent adjunct
with no other marketable skills. So I left to work at a software career.

~~~
bduerst
I feel like this is why undergraduate research is absolutely key.

I had the opportunity to work in a lab while an undergrad and to do a couple
industry research internships, and it set my expectations on what the Ph.D
really is (and why I didn't go for it).

The problem is that many do not know what to expect or have expectations that
differ from the reality.

~~~
fsk
In Math, it's almost impossible to do serious undergraduate-level research. It
takes about 2-3 years of graduate level study in a specialty to get to the
point where you are at new territory. Almost all the easy theorems have been
proven already.

Also, it wasn't until I was in graduate school that I realized people that
were comparable/smarter than me were struggling with mediocre jobs or not
finding any permanent job at all. I also saw people who were really weak but
picked a hot specialty doing rather well.

Also, everything is so specialized in Math that nobody really understand
anyone else's work. If everything is so specialized, then how can anyone
decide whose work is good and whose work is junk? If objectivity is completely
out the window in Math, what hope is there in other areas of science?

So it's essentially the same as being a programmer, where the skill of
promoting yourself is more valuable than the skill of doing good work. At
least I get paid more, and still have spare time to read about things that
interest me.

------
Sulfolobus
Cached copy as I'm not getting a response from that page:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:U3-ruJk...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:U3-ruJk3abcJ:crypto.junod.info/2013/09/09/an-
aspiring-scientists-frustration-with-modern-day-academia-a-
resignation/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk)

------
correlator
“it is important because I’ve spent too many years working on it”

This hits me really close to home. When I left graduate school, a lot of my
peers were unhappy about a lot of the same things I was. The reason a majority
of them stayed was because "I put so much time in already and what's another 3
years." I almost stayed for the same reason.

Sunk cost is a fallacy. Be happy now :)

------
scott_s
Previous discussion, from two years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6355579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6355579)

------
jleyank
I didn't see anything mentioning chemistry/science in the commentary, so
forgive me if I'm repeating something I missed...

The PhD is not "just for academia". It's the entry ticket for working in the
biotech/pharma business. It's a 4-6 year process that demonstrates that one
can do independent work in an organized fashion and write it up. Quite
similar, except for scale, as how medicinal chemists (and various support
disciplines) work.

One learns the jargon, often combines a complementary post-doc to round out
training (such as synthetic PhD following up with natural product p-doc). This
extra nudge improves the chance of being hired and can usually lead to more $$
upon hiring. PhD's usually know 1-2 things well. P-docs, maybe, push that up
to 3-5. It's a basis for getting started.

Is the entry-ticket aspect of a PhD fair to BS/MS students, who tend to be the
lab denizens who actually do the work? No, probably not. There's a huge status
difference between "PhD" and "pair of hands"... But then, as the difference is
only 2-ish years, carrying through to PhD should be the typical choice
(barring real-life issues forcing termination).

Due to job/geographic stability, it's not the best career choice, but it's a
useful one (as, for example, they actually DO work towards curing or
alleviating disease). The pay is reasonable, the chance for personal
recognition is present and there's chances for "financial renumeration" if one
scores big-time. And if groups like YC get really into funding longer-horizon
projects, the jobs just might reappear.

------
white-flame
I had always wanted to be a university professor.

I do a ton of practical algorithmic research in the course of personal and
professional software development. I love teaching and tutoring. I love
definitively and completely solving hard problems with new solutions. I love
devising proven partial solutions when that's not feasible, and looking
forward to the rest. When I get a bug up my nose about a problem, I do not
rest until it's solved, and solved properly.

It's probably around 15 years ago when I had my own realization that success
in academia is driven primarily by publishing metrics. Since that's the reward
mechanism, academia has optimized for that case above all else. As the article
lists, only the current hot topics for publishing get any authorization or
funding, so who knows what you'd actually be working on. And whatever you're
working on demands _everything_ you have to avoid failure. Beyond that level
of graduate indentured servant, it's all posturing and politics, still chasing
the hot publishing topics.

I have been able to work on projects that map well to sub-problems of my long
term interest field. Hobby and work blends nicely. I love what I do. While I'm
not yet reaping significantly financially, I do what I want and do not have
the stress and crunch of either academic process or a soul-sucking job, and
that was my tradeoff to decide.

I still have unbounded financial potential as a business owner and curator of
ground-breaking technologies. But I also know that technical merit does not
equate to success in the market; that's another set of skills, and its own
challenging industry.

------
atmosx
This is the last rant out of numerous appearing on the web. I wonder if, from
a historical perspective, wasn't always like that. Galileo risked his life for
science. Only undisputed geniuses of their time like Newton, Gauss or
Archimedes could think and say something _original_ without being ridiculed by
their peers.

~~~
tjradcliffe
Newton was ridiculed by his peers (or at least his contemporaries). Part of
the reason why people tell the story of Halley convincing Newton to publish
the Principia is that Newton hadn't published anything after the reception of
some of his early work on optics.

For example, one of Newton's observations was that the spectrum cast by a
prism he'd bought at a local fair was elongated. Being Newton, and therefore
given to extreme of care, he had arranged the prism in a room that was about
twenty feet long and was struck by sunlight coming through a pinhole in a
shutter. This is not a simple thing to arrange, and because the Earth is
rotating the correct geometry lasts quite a short time. But it allowed him to
see the elongation of the spectrum.

The problem was that received wisdom said the spectrum should be circular, as
it was cast by a circular beam. Some of the replies to Newton's paper were on
the order of, "Well, I held up a prism and took a quick look and it seemed
ciruclar to me! Mr Newton is a fool."

Science is always going to be like this. People are mostly idiots (I certainly
am, most of the time.) But the author's point is that it is worse now, and
that the institutional incentives that make it worse are pretty clear. Get a
couple of beer into an older scientist and they'll often tell you that they
couldn't have gotten an academic position in the current climate.

Furthermore, similar incentives are in play all over the world--althouhg a
friend in the Far East tells me things are better there because universities
are still trying to build reputations so they are engaged in more fundamental
research rather than just grant-writing.

Given this, and given we depend on science to solve some of our biggest
problems, and given we have a lot of smart, passionate, dedicated people going
into the sciences to solve those problems, an institutional structure that
fails to deliver on the promise of giving those people a meaningful career
solving problems that matter is a serious problem for Enlightenment
civilization.

~~~
atmosx
> Newton was ridiculed by his peers (or at least his contemporaries). Part of
> the reason why people tell the story of Halley convincing Newton to publish
> the Principia is that Newton hadn't published anything after the reception
> of some of his early work on optics.

It doesn't look like had it rough though. From his early years he was kinda
distinguished[1] at age 27. But thanks for the heads-up and your Newton story.
These stories are the ones I enjoy the most :-)

ps. You certainly don't look like an idiot to me. But I see what you mean, as
Shakespeare often hinted, the wise men allows _doubt_ into any conversation
while the fool men never does. :-)

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Early_life](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Early_life)

~~~
rndn
> _as Shakespeare often hinted, the wise men allows doubt into any
> conversation while the fool men never does._

This is also known as impostor syndrome [1] vs. Dunning-Kruger effect [2].

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

------
a_bonobo
Server seems to have been hugged to death.

Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:U3-ruJk...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:U3-ruJk3abcJ:crypto.junod.info/2013/09/09/an-
aspiring-scientists-frustration-with-modern-day-academia-a-
resignation/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=de)

Note that the link is from 2013.

------
bra-ket
Cached:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:U3-ruJk...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:U3-ruJk3abcJ:crypto.junod.info/2013/09/09/an-
aspiring-scientists-frustration-with-modern-day-academia-a-
resignation/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

------
eli_gottlieb
Yes, fine, we have all heard the complaints. I've thought similar things
myself.

But when are we going to put our heads together to analyze the problem into
its mutable points and immutable points, the better to find alternative
arrangements and solutions?

~~~
justizin
I'm getting some people to flesh out a graduate program to focus on this
problem, if you want to join..

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Not sure if ironic...

------
czep
"The Higher Learning in America", by Thorstein Veblen, 1918. If this poor
fellow had only read this book before commencing in his studies, perhaps it
would have steeled his nerves somewhat, or sent him in another direction.

------
cossatot
I sympathize with a lot of these complaints, but the thing that really bothers
me about a lot of these academia resignations, or complaints about the
academic job market, is that there is definitely an expectation that a path
(e.g., a job) should be provided for a young researcher to do whatever he or
she wants, research-wise. I really wish that graduate school was viewed less
as a job tunnel/funnel and more like undergrad, where it is an opportunity to
learn (and network, and signal, and so forth) but ultimately, it's up to the
student to pick a path, with the skills and reputation earned along the way.

To provide a counter to the hopelessness:

As much as I love the academy, and research, I never wanted to be a professor.
After my postdoc I started a research and consulting company (thanks HN for
many wise words of advice about going solo). I firmly believe that, in
contrast to the hierarchical and managerial state of academic (and a lot of
industrial) research, there is a valuable role to be played by professional
scientists. So many of the badass scientists I know have such a small fraction
of their time that they can devote to actually carrying out research[1], that
all of their wisdom, efficiency and so forth is somewhat wasted as they go
about their managerial lives as professors or industrial scientists. I don't
think it has to be this way.

I haven't been doing this forever, but so far it's been great. I have been
doing some interesting, research-oriented consulting (and some not so
interesting, too), which puts money in the bank. It also lets me see some of
the problems that industrial scientists deal with. I'm in geoscience and the
consulting so far is all in energy, and unsolved problems there are just as
cool if not cooler than the question du jour in academic work--and some of the
problems are exactly the same... And it's very rewarding to be brought in on
some of these projects, and help hard-working people out.

I also spend a good chunk of my time, half maybe, doing my own research,
collaborating with others, and writing proposals to NSF and other public
agencies. I of course have more ideas than I can ever hope to see through, but
I feel very free to work on whatever I see fit, even if it's a bit outside of
my experience and comfort zone.

In the end, I am hoping (and betting) that my accumulating strengths as a
professional researcher, combined with the falling costs of a lot of science,
particularly computational science and online journal access, will allow me to
be as productive or more as I would managing graduate students and post-docs,
and a lot happier. I also think that by doing consulting instead of teaching
(which I enjoy but not enough), I can have a bit higher maximum potential
income as well, and take a month off to raft through Peru when I get the
hankering.

OK, so just to summarize, this ended up more biographical than I wanted: I
think there is a market for professional, non-academic scientists, both in
academic-type (i.e. gov't-funded) and industrial research. It seems to be the
road less traveled but if you're not into that then science might not be your
thing. It might be very hard at times, and hopefully you have a good support
network.

[1]: I do believe that writing proposals is actually doing a very important
part of science by making you get your shit together and vet yourself. It'd be
fun if it wasn't for the existential pressure.

------
michaelochurch
Academia fucked up by copping an attitude toward the most important, but least
glamorous, aspect of the job: teaching. In the 1960s, the U.S. had a strong
research culture. Unfortunately, the professoriate took the attitude that
research was their real work and that teaching was just grunt work to be
sloughed off to the people at the bottom of the heap (graduate students and
juniors). Eventually, they turned that work over to low-paid adjunct faculty,
occasionally taking on an upper-level undergraduate course.

Teaching is important for a number of reasons, but it also functions as a
sales front for research. Research is important, but only educated people can
see its importance. If 40% of the next generation's leaders learn calculus and
5% learn complex analysis, then they'll have an appreciation for the beauty of
mathematics and an understanding of its importance. However, if they're taught
by overworked, underpaid adjuncts who've lost all enthusiasm for the subject,
then the rising generation will lose sight of why the work is importat.

This is, of course, bad for science but even worse for the humanities, where
the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next (i.e. teaching) is
almost the entire point, because commercial applications are nonexistent. I
won't call most humanities research unimportant, because I don't understand
most of it, but I will say that if you have a leadership class as ignorant of
the humanities as the American upper and upper-middle classes are, you're
going to have a hard time selling anyone on the importance of it. Most people
are quick to decry what they don't understand as useless and unnecessary.

When the research rock stars started de-emphasizing teaching and offloading
the work, the rest of society (including university administrators) called
their bluff. If they were so ready to slough off the teaching (which is what
most of the world sees as the real work) to overworked adjuncts, then why have
professors at all? Of course, a few politically adept stars (grant-writing
rain-makers) managed to hold on... but the quiet researchers are done.

The injustice of the tenure system is that the people to suffer for this
attitude were the young-- not the entrenched tenured professors who created
that culture. The jobs got taken away, but not from the people who copped that
negative attitude toward teaching. It was the rising generation (from 1985-ish
to today) that got fucked. At this point, you have a toxic culture of scarcity
and the false poverty mentality (i.e. the "I'm 75% poorer than my friends, so
I'm living a life of service and the rules don't apply to me" attitude).

