

How to think about science and becoming a scientist - jseliger
http://jseliger.com/2012/04/17/how-to-think-about-science-and-becoming-a-scientist/

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bedris
Two lines from the article:

 _Scientists and engineers expand the size of the economic pie; lawyers mostly
work to divide it up differently. Whenever possible, work to be a person who
creates things, instead of a person who tries to take stuff created by someone
else. There is an infinite amount of work in science because the universe is
big and we don’t really understand it and we probably never will. New answers
to questions in science yields more questions._

 _Greenspun makes and attend to his discussion of what grad school in the
sciences is like, especially this, his main point: “Adjusted for IQ,
quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in
the United States.”_

In other words, science is good for society but bad for the individual, from a
purely economic standpoint.

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kingkawn
What does "adjusted for IQ" mean?

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Daniel_Newby
It means comparing people in different jobs who have the same IQ.

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kingkawn
Haven't we reached the point yet where the whole idea of IQ testing is pretty
discredited? And adjusting for IQ, meaning that someone is smart therefore
they are expected to earn more money? It sounds like "taking into account
these variables, and introducing this ridiculous one to allow me to adjust the
outcomes as needed."

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roel_v
Well if you don't agree that somebody with an IQ of 120 can be reasonably
expected to be better at making money, and in the aggregate people with that
IQ do actually make more, than somebody with an IQ of 80, then you have such a
radically different view from the mainstream that any discussion is pointless.

FYI, adjusting for certain variables is a fundamental aspect of statistics.
All studies in social sciences and economics of real-world data do so, because
no real-world effect can be isolated to the point that it can be measured
independently.

"Haven't we reached the point yet where the whole idea of IQ testing is pretty
discredited?"

What? No, of course not. Are you saying that there are no people who are
smarter than others?

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bgilroy26
IQ is not synonymous with intelligence, it is married to the 20th century
philosophy of psychology and history of testing methods.

For IQ to simply mean the intelligence scale normalized so that average
intelligence = 100 would take a big marketing effort amongst the education and
psychology communities.

Even if it were divorced from the twists and turns of its historical
development, it seems pretty clear that at it's best IQ can aggregate the
values of creativity, lateral thinking, calculation, memory-retrieval, memory-
storage, memory-organization, (even, despite tester's best efforts) domain
knowledge together and replace them with one number.

I think that some of the "everybody learns differently!" stuff has jumped the
fence and become an old wives' tale, but there has to be a happy medium
between assigning someone a 40 column printout to summarize their intelligence
and slapping one number on it.

[This is not to mention all of the shift in emphasis away from intelligence
towards results and output based partially on Outliers, and partially on the
idea that if you praise kids for an inherent trait that they have no control
over that they will stop playing to win and start playing not-to-lose.]

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roel_v
I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me? Yes of course there
are various definitions and measurement methods of 'IQ' and 'intelligence' and
one can define all of them in various ways. Exact definitions aren't
interesting for the current purposes. What I said was, some people are smarter
than others, even when considering orthogonal traits. If we hypothetically
consider 'intelligence' as a combination of trait A, B and C, and we choose A,
B and C carefully enough so that we can score or normalize each of them to a
scale of 0-10, then Alice with a score of 8 on each of them is more
intelligent than Bob who scores 4 on each of them. Now in the margin you can
argue who is more intelligent when the scores are 5-8-4 and 5-4-8 but that
doesn't take away from the point.

It's not like we're talking about one specific methodology for measuring IQ.
The whole argument is in the context of the OP arguing that correcting for
intelligence is necessary for making a meaningful comparison between wages
earned (basically, it's discounting for opportunity cost). Which is totally
reasonable and obvious.

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bgilroy26
I think we were agreeing

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mukaiji
I am graduating this spring with a materials science degree from Stanford.
Materials science has the absolute most boring set of classes (seriously, it's
really bad). However, Material science also has what I think is some of the
most ground-breaking, fascinating, and magical scientific research topics out
there, from nanotech, biotech, and energy, to novel electronic form-factors,
batteries & fuel cell, and much more.

therefore:

Degree Classes != Actuality.

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elliott34
Arn't the biological sciences notorious for having way too many Phds than
relevant research jobs/professorships available? Scientific research should be
encouraged in undergrad with the caveat that it really only qualifies you for
grad school. Instead, one could spend summers in internships and enjoy more
employment opportunities upon graduation. Research can be fun, but reality
bites.

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bbgm
I spent many summers in research labs doing different kinds of scientific
projects (mostly in chemistry and physics). It was not only fun, but very
rewarding and resulted in a strong foundation in scientific thinking which has
always been useful, regardless of the specific job. Part of the reasons I
moved towards the biological sciences in grad school was partly due to
reality. As a quantum chemist (which I was at the time), opportunities were
limited. It was also the time that computational biology was getting really
interesting. I joined a startup 2 weeks after finishing my defense.

Caveat: I haven't been a practicing scientist for a while.

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srconstantin
Basically I agree that "when in doubt, learn science." In American society, we
have more of the norm of "when in doubt, don't learn any science." And that's
counterproductive.

In other countries, there are explicit and implicit reminders that science
students are smarter than non-science students. In my dad's (European) high
school, students were literally tracked from A to F; A was math, B was
physics, biology and social sciences were somewhere in the middle, and
vocational school was at the bottom. Harsh? Yeah. But it meant that
generically smart and ambitious kids wound up in the hard sciences by default.

~~~
roel_v
What country was that? In my original European high school, those with the
highest grades went studying the classics, with maths being a fallback for
those who didn't quite make the cut.

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literatish
Interesting -- my dad went to school in Ireland and had tracks similar to the
previous commenter, the A track being the most math intensive (although
everyone on that track also studied Latin and Gaelic). Where was your high
school?

~~~
roel_v
Belgium.

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soccerniru
I disagree with a lot of points made here. First, this is focused exclusively
on the biological sciences, and is largely not applicable to other fields
(hence the title is misleading). Second, there are a lot of personal anecdotes
which don't move the central ideas forward. Finally, there was little in the
article that discussed how to _think_ about science, most of it was how to
_pursue_ science.

That being said, I agree with the sentiment. Most of what we teach
undergraduates is about the knowledge science is produced, rather than about
the process of doing science itself.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I didn't read the whole thing - it's not concise, that's for sure - but the
general advice seems to be: Go find a lab job and see if you like it. Though
his examples are specific to biology, I can't figure out what part of that
_advice_ is specific to biology. I did it in experimental physics and it
worked out just fine.

Sure, the article is about about _pursuing_ science rather than thinking about
it. But that's the author's whole point. Enjoying a career is all about
enjoying the day-to-day work: If you love thinking about DNA but don't love
pipets, you're going to be unhappy a lot of the time, because life in the lab
is about 10% deep thought and 90% pipets. (Or, in the semiconductor laser lab:
10% deep thought, 50% misaligned optics, and 40% mysterious process problems
that you will never entirely understand, but which you will eventually solve
by spending months on end turning knobs in a strategic manner.)

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mturmon
Agree about low information density of article.

Same general advice applies in engineering: do your best to attach yourself to
a lab, and see if it catches your fancy. Best way to test-drive a career
choice.

He's kind of down on textbook-and-problem-set coursework and large lecture
classes. This is not universal. Some large lectures are large for a reason --
the professor is a star. And some textbooks are really good, and some problem
sets are worth sweating over.

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2muchcoffeeman
If you can, don't choose. Get 2 degrees. I studied physics. I make a lousy
physicist, but I learned a lot, got to play with some cool stuff and it gave
me a whole new appreciation of the world and how it worked.

It is also the last time you get to play with lab equipment that costs
hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Absolutely no regrets.

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solox3
If one were truly amazed by science, nothing would be in ones way to becoming
a scientist; the knowledge is all there, the tools are all there (reactants,
catalysts and conditions for illegal materials notwithstanding), and if you
are indeed one of these people who are destined to be a scientist ("he who
seeks knowledge"), rather than an engineer ("he who wants hands-on") then
there is nothing to explore than the minds of your own, or the minds of others
(by means of scientific databases, readily available online).

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hippee-lee
So how would you go about learning LC-MS/MS and applying the various
separation techniques to small molecules or proteins?

Instruments start at 250k and many in universities are decades older than what
is currently used in industry. For small molecules, the most challenging (and
exciting) library's of compounds are owned by third parties.

It is my opinion that science, much like programming, one has to do it to
learn it. There are limitations to the knowledge you gain without being hands
on. See E.O Wilsons musings of the impact his formative years and post grad
school wanderings in the south pacific. He is certainly a scientist but much
of his knowledge and insight is due to the hands on approach he used to to
gain that knowledge.

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bbgm
Completely agree. I don't think I am going to put a 900 MHz NMR or an Orbitrap
in my basement :)

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hippee-lee
I know! I can just hear my daughter, 'Daddy, turn that down. I'm trying to
watch Doc McStuffins. Why do you have to do science on a Saturday morning?'

Then there is the electrical bill and I already get hell from my wife for the
water bill during the summer months.

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wink
That was awesomely inspiring and fun to read, actually makes me feel bad a
little for pursuing CS :)

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snowwrestler
The profession of science is really, really hard, and generally does not pay
well. But, when you learn something new in science, you have learned something
that no one else knows, that is fundamental to the very structure of reality.

To be a happy professional scientist, the emotional stimulus of that kind of
discovery needs to be strong enough to carry you through all the hardship.

