
Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system (2013) - ramgorur
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system
======
mpweiher
When I was first exposed to the research "environment" during my Diplom
studies (undergraduate - graduate, early to mid 90ies), I immediately
recognised that if you actually love research and knowledge, academia was the
last thing you ever want to get into. No surer way to kill the spark.

Now that I've gone back to do my PhD, the only reason I can do something I
consider meaningful is because I am not a regular PhD student. Interestingly,
that's also the feedback I get, though as "helpful" advice that while what I
am doing may be both good and important, it is unlikely to lead to success in
academia. With the implication that I should stop doing it and concentrate on
something more reasonable. Fortunately, I am not particularly interested in
success in modern academia, so I get to do something I consider both good and
important.

A related issue is that there really is no such thing as a senior researcher.
Instead, professors are turned into research managers, responsible for helping
their charges' careers, who then also turn into research managers. Actual
research appears to be mostly a still not entirely avoidable side-effect. (And
this seems similar to the way the only real way to advancement in industry is
to switch to management, all dual-track equivalence rhetoric aside).

~~~
hyperbovine
Sorry, but your argument loses serious credibility beginning with the first
sentence. The _last_ thing, really? How about, say, making cardboard boxes for
a living? Flipping burgers? Don't get me wrong, I understand the point you are
making, in part because it's been made more articulately by others many times
already. But you are simply wrong when you say that "there is no such thing as
a senior researcher". I personally know at least four -- late career academics
who still engage deeply with research, have their own ideas, write single
-author papers, and all the rest. It's true that many others do go the route
you have described: possibly more than is optimal, though there is some value
in a field having a few caretakers (or managers as you call them) which I
rarely see mentioned. But the situation is not the cartoon that you make it
out to be. Not by a long shot.

~~~
mpweiher
> The last thing, really? How about, say, making

> cardboard boxes for a living? Flipping burgers?

Or working as a patent clerk, maybe?

Yes, pretty much _anything_ outside the academic process was what I meant, so
that your livelihood does not depend on the outcome of your research, because
then you have to tailor your research directions towards the safe and
accepted. And so your straw men actually would work, though suboptimally
because the income is probably too low to allow you free time.

Also, misquoting me by leaving out the "really" makes your argument
disingenuous, because the "really" made clear that the statement is not a 100%
but a trend (if a somewhat overwhelming one), and 4 exceptions (names?) don't
exactly disprove a generalization.

It would also be interesting if you see your four examples as holdouts from a
different era, or general exceptions. I'd wager they're more of the former
rather than the latter, and that their number is dwindling.

~~~
lx9911
> Or working as a patent clerk, maybe?

Does it still work though? In the days of Einstein, I imagine you could slack
off easier in such a position than nowadays.

The problem these days is that we're inundated with busywork not only in
academia, but in most occupations.

~~~
hilop
Reddit (and to some extent HN) are proof that there are plenty of white collar
jobs with oodles of free time.

~~~
ScottBurson
It's not the right _kind_ of time, though. Reading and occasionally posting
usually don't require sustained concentration -- they can mostly be done as a
break from that. (Of course there are times when an interesting and difficult
topic shows up, or a debate arises that one wants to participate in.) So for
the most part, it's a break from work. Switching from one nontrivial technical
task to squeeze bits of a much more difficult task into one's day is much
harder.

------
erikb
I can feel him. It is not just in science, but in business as well. People
want results, not understand their problems. And they want them yesterday,
despite only telling you about it today. In some regards it's just a trick to
keep you working hard for them. But still it's neither fun nor actually
productive.

It's great to work with freelancers though, since from the good ones you can
learn how to handle that situation: Don't give users, customers, management
enough information to really control you, understand that you are the one
providing the results or not, and don't talk about your work but only about
that part of the results that they actually care about. This way they don't
consider you unproductive or incompetent, but that they need you. They still
hate you, but they hate you because they need you. And that you can use to
actually solve problems, take the time you need, and thereby provide the
results they really need.

~~~
return0
> but in business as well

I think business is more ruthless. It won't let you waste too much time in a
false belief that your product or science will become successful. That leads
to faster iteration.

~~~
pcrh
In the pharmaceutical business at least, huge sums of money are frequently
spent on strategies that even graduate students could point out as being
unlikely to succeed. The reasoning behind these unproductive decisions is
almost always "markets".

~~~
adrianratnapala
Can you elaborate on how this works? Do you mean there is (in effect) some
kind of market for vapourware, so companies work on things that sound good
even though they predictably can't work? Who benefits?

~~~
pcrh
The people who benefit are those who can raise funds/support for the next
round.

It is more difficult to obtain objective evidence about biological sciences
and its subset, medicine, than other fields such as maths or chemistry. This
is due to the inherent complexity and poorly understood processes by which
living organisms thrive, or not.

So, there is abundant interest from non-experts (i.e. potential investors or
market analysts) in gaining a slice of attractive markets such as currently
unmet conditions e.g. lung cancer or Alzheimer's disease. Such people are
sometimes more easily swayed by the proclamations of "famous professors" than
graduate students might be.

So, yes, there is in effect a lot of "vapourware" in the drug business. And
much of it succeeds precisely because there is insufficient expertise on the
behalf of investors, who get their knowledge of the underlying science third
hand, or worse.

------
bvv
Peter Higgs published about 5 scientific papers after his Nobel-winning work
in 1964 until his retirement in 1996, none of which were particularly
impressive. I think this is below any reasonable standards, not just below
contemporary academic standards. Therefore, barring special circumstances like
an exemplary teaching record, in my opinion Edinburgh University would have
been right to sack him and replace him with a more productive person. In
short: I don't think that Higgs nearly getting sacked is an accurate
indication that academia has too much of a 'publish or perish' culture.

~~~
aub3bhat
This is a truly idiotic thing to say.

"none of which were particularly impressive"

First who are you to judge quality of his work, that guy has a Nobel. Imagine
if they did follow your utterly idiotic suggestion and did kick him out, other
universities who recognize importance of his work and would instantly hire
him. Years later when he would actually win the prize, Edinburgh University
would look crazy for kicking out a Nobel prize winning physicist.

So no Peter Higgs is a genius, he knew importance of what he had achieved and
took leisurely path, nothing wrong in that. Edinburgh University knew
importance of his work and correctly decided that keeping him was a great
investment.

The fact that you think that a researcher who won a Nobel prize somehow did
not work "hard enough" in later years and should have been fired is a great
indicator of dysfunctional academic culture.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
Beyond his Higgs Boson papers, the rest haven't been cited particularly much.
Not indicative of a genius. Sure, no-one is calling him stupid, but there are
potentially many other people who have changed the field as much, or more than
him. Just because he won a Nobel Prize for one work doesn't make him immune to
criticism.

~~~
aub3bhat
There is valid criticism, and then there's "this guy did not do anything after
making a Nobel worthy discovery, should have been kicked out".

Also "haven't been cited particularly much" is utterly bullshit. Unless the
goal is to optimize for mediocrity (3 papers each year with 20-50 citations
each) being better than one break-through Nobel worthy work. Frankly citations
are very very easy to game if you are a professor with reasonable means at a
good university, and are a really really bad indicator of success.

Since he already had a very successful paper maybe he wanted to write risky
papers. In any case that's not worse than other researchers who write cookie-
cutter papers adding extra terms to equations that are guaranteed to be cited
by the next guy adding even more terms. By finding these minor faults with a
Nobel award winning researcher, you are displaying the same dysfunctional
thinking that has plagued academia.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
I'm not sure why you have this idea that academia is resistant to paradigm
shifts; they happen all the time. Any papers that are "risky" enough to start
such paradigm shifts end up getting cited _tons_.

~~~
aub3bhat
Its not me but rather its you who has the wrong idea that all papers with 50
citations are good. Or rather the more citation == better research.

Frankly almost 95% of papers are crap and better off not having been written,
had it not been for publish or perish culture, or "lets count papers/cites to
shame a Nobel award winning researcher culture" that you espouse.

Citations are a self reinforcing metric. Once a community starts counting
them, the only way to succeed is to publish more which in turns leads to
higher counts.

There is nothing wrong in publishing a good thorough paper over 4 years maybe
slowly updating it as a working paper as done in economics.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
I am not saying that all papers with citations are good; rather, that most
good papers get tons of citations.

------
robotresearcher
We expect senior professors to train students. How do you train students? By
getting them to do work and write papers. If they haven't published by
graduation time, they can't prove they can get the job done. This is the main
reason that senior people produce a lot of papers - they have a lot of
students.

I've written a bunch of papers - I don't care any more about quantity. But I
want each of my graduating students to have a publication or two so they can
get a job. So we turn out a bunch of papers every year, and no, not every one
is earth-shaking, partly because roughly every second paper is a student's
first one and that's what they were capable of at the time.

It's easy to miss this kind of dynamic from the outside.

~~~
Tomminn
This is a great point. Although I would wager that the large quantity of
mediocre papers your students have produced have not exactly harmed your own
career. So, while your personal motives may be beyond repute, there will be
many academics who think "This is the main reason senior people have a lot of
students- they produce a lot of papers." Which is one of the dynamics that is
troublesome. The marginal value of another PhD student to a senior professor
is almost always fairly positive. Which means senior professors have an
incentive to maximize the number of PhD students. This has two problems:

1) The value of the senior professor's mentorship to each PhD student
diminishes (maybe almost linearly) with each PhD student added.

2) If each senior professor hires on average X PhD students per generation,
approximately (1/X) of the those PhD students can become senior professors if
the rate that academia grows is negligible compared to growing X times as
large per generation. (And right now, X must be at least 20.)

~~~
robotresearcher
Don't forget that a prof has to raise the money in ferocious competition to
fund every student. Only successful profs can get enough money for a lot of
students.

~~~
Tomminn
Success defined how? By publication record. Which leads to the rich get richer
dynamic I think is troublesome. The more students you have, the easier it is
to get funding for more students.

~~~
robotresearcher
Rich-get-richer sounds unfair, but if you controlled studio time, would you
give it to Radiohead or Vanilla Ice?

Some people have proven themselves to be really good at things, and it makes
sense to give them the resources to do it well.

Most countries also have special funding contests only for young researchers
to bootstrap themselves into the main contests.

------
wazoox
Jean-Pierre Sauvage (chemistry Nobel price 2016) said exactly the same thing
recently. Working without pressure for 30 years in a state funded facility was
central to his achievements.

~~~
Odenwaelder
How can he know whether that's actually true? Everyone is troubled by the
current state of science. How can we know whether that's not the standard old
man's wish for the good old days?

~~~
OJFord
I don't believe that's true of Higgs, since he said it of a period in which he
was still 'in the system':

    
    
        > Higgs said he became "an embarrassment to the department
        > when they did research assessment exercises". A message
        > would go around the department saying: "Please give a
        > list of your recent publications." Higgs said: "I would
        > send back a statement: 'None.' "
        >
        > By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable
        > with the new academic culture.

~~~
greeneggs
He retired in 1996, but judging from his CV it looks like he stopped doing
research in the 1960s or 70s. [1] His last research paper was published in
1979, and the paper before that was published in 1966. Perhaps he was an
excellent teacher, but it doesn't seem like he needed to be in a research
university.

[1] [http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs/peter-
higgs](http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs/peter-higgs)

~~~
OJFord
I read it as yours being exactly the view he disliked; that his lack of
published research papers did not correspond to any lack of his doing
research.

~~~
greeneggs
I don't know if he was doing research or not. (And I'm not trying to judge him
either way, since I know almost nothing about him.) But when he was doing his
Nobel-winning work, he was publishing on average about one paper per year.
Then he published one paper in 13 years, and then zero papers in 17 years (and
never again). He could have been doing research but unsuccessfully.

He didn't lose his job. (One might argue that he should have, but I won't.) He
just said that he would have a hard time finding a different job. Isn't that
obvious? If you are looking for a new job at a research university with zero
publications for 17 years, you can hardly expect departments to be dying to
hire you.

I think most people in that situation are not doing any research. Most
researchers with ambitious research projects still manage to publish
occasionally, not just for "the system" but for themselves. You want to know
that you are making at least a little progress on something. Andrew Wiles, for
example, published every year or two throughout his work, with the exception
of one four-year gap. [1] No 17-year gap.

[1]
[http://web.math.princeton.edu/WebCV/WilesBIB.pdf](http://web.math.princeton.edu/WebCV/WilesBIB.pdf)

------
leksak
This may be a symptom of the hyper-connective world we live in today. You
observe this phenomenon elsewhere outside of academia as well. There is an
intense pressure to distinguish oneself from the greater body of people
occupying the same industry as yourself.

Consider that a vibrant Github profile is essentially a prerequisite to be
considered as an engaged professional in software engineering these days. It
doesn't matter if you have ethical qualms about Github, or spend most of your
day doing... your day job.

A 22-year old shouldn't have to fret about not having enough public
repositories or not having contributed enough to open-source. I'd expect any
craftsman to start producing their best work well into their career, and not
at the start of it.

~~~
trendia
Ethical qualms about Github? Could you explain? Should I worry about hosting
my code there?

~~~
leksak
Beyond uptime concerns (which Github manages very well) is the fact that it is
closed source, and whenever you use a closed system but that provides very
good services for free you yourself is the commodity.

Beyond that, dozzie's remark is very much on point, the host could become
tainted in the same way as for instance SourceForge. Fortunately, the
distributed nature of Git means that you are unlikely to "lose" your source-
code.

But really you have no control over your code, it is their liberty to censor
it if they please.

The primary issue, as far as I am concerned, is that while I can clone and go
elsewhere is that Github is the centralized hub for (FL)OSS today. Everything
lives there. If you are not on there, you are de facto invisible.

A better alternative, as far as I am considered, would be a distributed net of
"self-hosted" Gitlab instances.

I am not comfortable with all the bad press that Github has suffered regarding
gender equality, but I feel that I am suffering from vendor lock-in due to the
success of the platform.

~~~
hilop
If GitHub censors your code, or even if they don't, you can publish it
elsewhere

~~~
leksak
Absolutely, but that is part of the ethical qualm. You are perpetuating the
use of Github as the dominant (code) social network by using it.

If you continue to use it after Github has performed an act of censorship (or
anything else that violates your values) and you continue to use the service
then that act goes unpunished as they will keep their market share and may
repeat that act again. After all, there weren't enough negative consequences
to avoid doing so in the future.

------
SubiculumCode
The core problem are grant procedures. Universities get a 20%+ cut of grants a
professor eecieved. Therefore they wants professors who receive lots of
grants. Grant awarders are judged on their ability to choose applicants that
create value using those funds. An easy metric is papers produced. And those
who publish lots of papers in the past is a good predictor of future
production. So these are the applicants that get funded.

Another problem is the lack of funds for professor positions relative to the
number of trained applicants. With so many qualified academics, departments
have to use some metric to base decisions, and publications is more measurable
(grant $$$) than scientific value.

~~~
mattkrause
20+% is optimistic. Overhead rates (at R1s in the US) are closer to 50-70%.
I've heard tell of places with extremely specialized facilities (like deep-sea
research vessels) that charge nearly 100% overhead (i.e., to spend $50,000 on
"your" research, you need to bring in at least 100,000).

~~~
SubiculumCode
Yes. But there is variability per institute and so was trying to be
conservative in the lower threshold of the percentage cut.

The university cut does make some sense. There are a lot of services on which
PI's rely. Administration to handle hiring processes. Building maintenance and
plumbing. But per usual, instead of just covering costs, it is viewed as
revenue on which to grow the university (and admin pay).

Actually, I am not sure whether university cut factors into funding decisions
at NIH and the like.

~~~
mattkrause
Sure, I just wanted to put the actual numbers out there because 20% or so
actually seems pretty fair for keeping the lights on, taking out the trash,
etc, while 70+% is....a lot. On top of this, a lot of the....infrastructure is
still fee-for-service. The university may fund the initial purchase of an MRI
scanner (or whatever) out of overhead, but individual labs still pay $400+ an
hour to use it.

I don't know if the NIH or NSF takes overhead into account, but many of the
most successful grantees also have some of the highest overhead so probably
not.

On the flip side, I've heard someone claim that their department chair
_strongly_ encouraged applying for NIH grants, because the NIH-negotatied
overhead rate is much higher than other funders (also, allegedly more
prestigious, but you'd think $500,000 spends about the same, regardless of
where it comes from).

------
Odenwaelder
He is probably right. The current academic environment is terrible and drives
talented young researchers out of basic research. But still, it delivers. The
question for me is, does it deliver more, less or the same amount of knowledge
than during Higgs's time?

~~~
evacchi
I'd say it produces enough. At the cost of the health of the researchers. Many
people (including me) leave not because they do not like research, but because
they have grown to hate the environment.

~~~
code_scrapping
I can relate to that. I would go as far as hate, but definitely disappointed.
As an PhD in CS I've seen my share of pressure and I agree completely that
it's just not a way to do meaningful research as much as it's mass production
of small incremental steps. It's debatable whether big breakthroughs Van
happen this way

~~~
mafribe
Big breakthroughs too are really just a collection of small incremental steps
-- but the observer isn't aware of the intermediate steps.

~~~
TrinTragula
Well, this is isn't always the case. Most of the time they are not really
hidden, they are just a huge amount of new results not correlated with each
other, that everyone knows about. Then someone comes and finds the thing that
correlates them all. Think about special relativity and what will probably
happen when we will finally solve the general relativity/quantum theory
riddle.

------
dschuetz
I ditched my academics career and went into public service. I expected to do
actual science, instead I ended up studying bad papers which cost huge piles
of money. I feel sorry for the naive and the burnt-out young academics.
Potential wasted all the way.

------
DrNuke
A strong will is needed to do research in the dark, you are going to sacrifice
a lot and as an outsider you will almost always be looked down, very often
rightly so (because you miss the day-to-day peer review that at the very least
avoids you methodological or execution mistakes).

------
guelo
It was cruel and unusual punishment by whoever it was that recommended that a
scientist who doesn't watch television should watch that awful scientist
insulting sitcom.

------
partycoder
The problem is that universities and journals are ranked.

Rankings are based, in part, on metrics related to publications and citations
and that's the utility function they try to optimize.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish)

------
transposed
"He has never been tempted to buy a television, but was persuaded to watch The
Big Bang Theory last year, and said he wasn't impressed."

... [ _choppy panted laughter_ ]

~~~
inlineint
"...to this day he owns neither a TV nor mobile phone, and only acquired his
first computer on his 80th birthday."

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-
higgs-...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-
interview-underlying-incompetence)

Perhaps he used his computer to watch it.

------
throwwit
Eventually, the biggest consequence of a focus on incremental advancements may
be that there will be no more 'Einsteins' or Higgses in a role-model sense.

------
agumonkey
A sign of the higher freq / lower amplitude of todays era ?

