Anyone using AI tools should assume that at least 20% of what it produces will be wrong: Missing details, inventing things, basic mistakes.
Use AI if being 80% right quickly is fine. Otherwise if you have to do the analysis anyway because accuracy is critical, there's little point to the AI - its too unreliable.
If we had the renewables to replace the coal politicians would love it to retire in a heartbeat. The reason it’s sticking it around longer is because politicians fear the backlash from blackouts and high prices more than the backlash from the bad PR of delaying closures of coal.
When Tassie dams get low, they import power from the mainland. It’s a common seasonal thing. Drought + Basslink outage had the gov buying and running diesel gen at huge cost to keep the grid running. The Basslink outage made a problem a crisis.
You also have to factor in how terrible post-doc pay and job security is, just to have a shot at getting on the tenure track. In the US it's half of that 80k number in bio research.
We also need to dispel the myth that tenure track academic roles are the only jobs for scientists. In my field, one can have a wonderful, decently-paying career working in some of the most desirable places in the US if they go the national lab route. There's also a thriving private sector which will just get bigger. This doesn't even factor in the exit ramp careers if, late in the game, a student realizes that "science" isn't quite what they want to do for their 9-5 - e.g., trading in all of those hundreds or thousands of hours grinding data analyses for their Masters/PhD for a career in data science or software engineering.
We should make sure that folks understand a modern career in science may look, from a salary and QoL perspective, quite like a doctor or other professional. High-stress, relatively low-pay, challenging from your late teens to late twenties, then a rapid increase in earning power and opportunity into your early thirties.
I completely agree, but I think most people who arrive at this perspective only reach this view after spending time in industry or adjacent to people working there.
A lot of the focus on tenure track jobs comes from professors and academics who dedicate their life almost solely in academic environments (so in their view, it’s a rather unhealthy attitude of academic tenure or bust). I’m not sure how feasible this is, but perhaps a work-study private sector summer internship could be an encouraged part of certain PhD, to widen perspectives and help both students and professors better understand the possibilities out there, which someone can be motivated to strive for, rather than settle for.
Absolutely. There have always been domains where industry roles have been just as sought after as academic ones - think Computer Science broadly, and all the opportunities one has with a PhD there. Other domains have been slow to catch on to this, but it seems like there has been an inflection point over the past 10 years where we're just so grossly overproducing PhDs in so many domains relative to academic jobs that there is mounting pressure on degree programs to revamp their training/prep for "alternative" career paths.
Myself and colleagues are definitely trying to encourage our alma mater to have more support for externships other opportunities in industry. I think things will continue to change - for the better, for early career scientists - over the next 5-10 years. If only because there is a workforce crisis in my field where skills like AI and software engineering are in extremely high demand, but even 3-4 years ago we actively discouraged PhD students from pursuing this type of work!
In my time as a PhD student (granted still there currently just at the finishing things up stage) I was actually part of founding an organization for students to basically do this. We invited speakers from different fields and had them talk about "alternative" career paths considering the current system basically assumes you want to become a professor. We also included a workshop every year where we would build in career skills and have professionals come and speak. You learn very quickly that there is an incredible range of activities one can do with a PhD.
Sometimes they do. Regardless, if it's often coming from funding that implies the authors have to have grants or come from institutions that are willing to pay, which disadvantages individuals without resources (they often have discounts for those without resources but in my personal experience the discount is absurdly small, like 15%, which is a lot for someone who just doesn't have external resources to publish under that model, if they're asking for 2k+ per paper).
Either way it creates a backward incentive structure, of pay to access.
