[HN Gopher] Advice for young scientists and curious people in ge...
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Advice for young scientists and curious people in general
Author : yarapavan
Score : 166 points
Date : 2021-05-19 07:44 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fs.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (fs.blog)
| tudorw wrote:
| I'd love to hear from a mature scientist familiar with this
| advice from the outset of their career tell us how the reality
| lined up, things like '"A scientist will normally have
| contractual obligations to his employer and has always a special
| and unconditionally binding obligation to the truth."' seem a
| little idealistic in a contemporary setting?
| vagrantJin wrote:
| I'd say science is itself an ideal, like the law, but with
| application of rigour. The moment you stop seeking trutg, it's
| no longer science but akin to alchemy or astrology.
|
| But then we get to the slippery slope of lying outright vs
| "cooking the math" to suit your hypothesis. It's still not
| clear where the line is drawn.
| DrAwdeOccarim wrote:
| It's very apt. The only issue I take is the point to work on
| something important rather than something interesting. Sure,
| you can find interest at sufficient depth in nearly any topic
| if you're a good scientist, but you'll miss out on the truly
| groundbreaking stuff--the long tail stuff.
|
| For example (obvs YMWV), when I started graduate school in the
| mid-aughts, my interest was piqued by a little studied RNA
| modification called pseudouridine. I actually had another prof
| in the department ask why I didn't want to work on something
| "important". Turns out it was pretty important for improving
| human health and reducing disease in unforeseen ways. If I
| hadn't followed my gut interest that said "hmm?" when I first
| learned about it, I would have missed out on something grand.
|
| Maybe what I would add is the pursuit of a PhD, IMHO, is a
| privilege. It's a time to drift and wander around a topic of
| interest; not a time to bust your ass. It's a time for pious
| interrogation of the universe. You should not be gunning for
| money or fame or success, but rather focused on making
| connections with other scientists to come up with answers to
| interesting questions about how things work.
|
| So who can spend so many of their prime years possibly not
| accomplishing anything of value? Someone who is privileged. I
| am all, all, all for opening up doors to everyone, but the risk
| is that "getting a PhD" turns into the pursuit in and of
| itself. We are seeing this now more with people assuming the
| higher degree is simply the next step after a masters or
| bachelors degree. It wasn't designed for that.
|
| But with all this being said, I love how humanity evolves and
| I'm down for enabling anyone who hustles to get ahead. If this
| is what society thinks a PhD should become, then let's try it
| out. But people need to make sure they realize the way things
| used to play out after the degree are no longer the rule but
| more of the exception.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Just curious, how did that work out for you, career-wise? How
| would it have worked out if pseudiuridine didn't turn out to
| be important?
| ramraj07 wrote:
| The only thing that's hard to reconcile for me is advice to
| "work on something important". That's like asking someone to
| just get better from depression. If we can all truly agree on
| what's important and what's not that's half the problem solved
| right there.
|
| Other issue is that if a problem is important then a lot of
| folks are already on it. Is it worth everyone's time for one
| more person to come and compete for the same goal? This only
| makes sense if you know that you can bring a new perspective to
| that topic (which unfortunately every scientist believes they
| do).
| wombat23 wrote:
| Nice reminder of some general principles. I wonder how well it
| applies to young scientists given today's academic career
| prospects, though.
|
| > If you want to make progress in any area, you need to be
| willing to give up your best ideas from time to time. [...]
| Medawar notes that he twice spent two whole years trying to
| corroborate groundless hypotheses.
|
| Unfortunately, being willing to scrap your idea is only one part
| of the equation. Securing funding after 2 "failed" post-docs is
| an entirely different matter.
| DrAwdeOccarim wrote:
| Ouch. Your point is tough to stomach, but there is another side
| to it they don't teach you in school: tenure-track research
| isn't the only path. In fact, tenure-track research may
| actually be the worst path for the vast, vast majority of PhD
| graduates.
| thatcherc wrote:
| What are the other options here? Sounds like you've got some
| good perspective!
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Exactly. It's foolish to follow this path. There's a ton of
| VC money out there, if you need millions or billions to see
| your idea through. If not just make your own money. Honestly
| feels less stressful and hypocritical than the academic Ponzi
| scheme.
| veddox wrote:
| Few academic disciplines lend themselves to monetarisation
| via startups. Indeed, many academic disciplines don't lend
| themselves to _any_ kind of monetarisation, except academic
| funding.
| linguae wrote:
| However, building a business is a different problem from
| doing research. When one accepts VC funding, the funding
| comes with the expectation that it will lead to a high-
| growth business. This is fine when you have an idea that
| has the potential to "take off" from a business standpoint.
|
| However, there are many research problems where there is no
| obvious or immediate business application. The aim of such
| research is different from the aim of investors. This
| requires a different funding source, one that is willing to
| embrace the risks that come with research and is willing to
| do work solely for the advancement of science, with
| productization being a nice side effect rather than an
| expectation.
|
| Of course, obtaining such funding is not easy. Part of what
| makes modern academia such a rat race is because of how
| competitive it is to procure research funding from funding
| agencies such as the NSF (disclaimer: this is a US point of
| view; I'm not very familiar with the situation abroad). My
| advisor works hard applying for grants, and sometimes they
| get rejected. I'd love a Genius Grant ($125,000 a year for
| five years with no strings attached) to work on whatever
| research I want without any pressures from the funding
| agency or from managers, but there are only so few awarded
| per year.
|
| There is also the matter of research freedom in the sense
| of being free from the pressures of short term thinking and
| "publish or perish" mentality. I am reminded of Alan Kay's
| observations (http://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/) about
| short-term research. I'm also reminded of what the
| discoverer of the electron, J.J. Thompson, once said in a
| 1916 speech that resonates with me whenever I think about
| research:
|
| "If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you
| will want to have something to point to at the end of the
| year to show that the money has not been wasted. In
| promising work of the highest class, however, results do
| not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass
| without any tangible result being obtained, and the
| position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and
| he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate
| a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by
| year tangible results which would justify his salary. The
| position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if
| you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a
| different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for
| doing something else and give him enough leisure to do
| research for the love of it."
|
| For me, my dream is to start and grow a non-research
| lifestyle business that pays the bills, so that way I can
| spend the rest of my time on research, which is what I'm
| passionate about.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I am in the same path, make the money and fund my own
| research. All other models have been perverted by
| existing long enough that the culture around them is very
| antithetic to the true motivation of the endeavor.
|
| The only systems not amenable to this model is perhaps
| high energy physics or things of that sort but I'm sure
| some resourceful mind will come up with ideas!
| hundreddaysoff wrote:
| Exactly. Most academics really can't win. It's how the system
| is designed.
|
| This is why I sold out after my MD/PhD and became just a
| regular physician. Maybe in a few decades I'll have enough in
| savings to fulfill my dream of becoming a mad scientist...
| wombatpm wrote:
| Sprague Dawley rats are so expensive though. You might just
| want to get informed-ish consent from your patients.
| [deleted]
| danieltillett wrote:
| This is why you should not ever dedicate yourself to a single
| project no matter how much you believe in it. You should at a
| minimum have one back up project that will generate publishable
| results no matter what happens.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| You should always have some "R&D" regardless of what you do,
| what you're working on, etc.
|
| Focus is great. But it has a tendency to create blinders,
| feed confirmation bias, etc.
| tasogare wrote:
| This page is full of junk statements. Picking some extracts and
| adding some commentary made by someone without experience in the
| field isn't helpful.
|
| > Science proceeds because researchers do all they can to
| disprove their hypotheses rather than prove them right.
|
| Obviously written by someone who has never step a foot in a lab.
|
| > When there's an urgent need, we learn faster and avoid
| unnecessary learning.
|
| There is no such thing as unnecessary learning as the benefits of
| something learn can pay in an unexpected way later on. Which is
| how some great discoveries were made. I agree that reading too
| much is a form of procrastination, but advocating ignorance is no
| good either.
| thejackgoode wrote:
| > This page is full of junk statements. Picking some extracts
| and adding some commentary made by someone without experience
| in the field isn't helpful.
|
| IMHO FS is a "modern gospel" echo chamber with little to no new
| ideas. Why people link it here so often is a mystery to me
| borroka wrote:
| FS: "It sounds good, but it does not work."
| pitspotter wrote:
| _> To be creative, scientists need libraries and laboratories and
| the company of other scientists; certainly a quiet and untroubled
| life is a help_
|
| This is contradicted by Richard Hamming in his lecture on
| creativity. He points out a famous, tranquil, well-equipped
| environment, viz. the Institute for Advanced Study, where only
| very few breakthroughs have been made:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlTybZvds0U
| thisismyswamp wrote:
| I like the general tone of this advice towards action over
| consumption. I have found that to be a good way to approach my
| interest in deep learning research.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| If this were written today, most of the advice would be tips and
| tricks for getting your papers into high-profile journals and
| writing grants. Which in turn boils down to having a good
| pedigree from your PhD and postdoc advisors.
| williesleg wrote:
| Globalist advice is to shit up and conform.
| neopba wrote:
| Very interesting. I also advise the check out the famous Advice
| for a Young Investigator by S.R. y Cajal
| boringg wrote:
| Am I the only one who is getting kind of ill from the amount of
| blogs out there (farnam street is just an example) that have a
| business about selling ideas/advice to people?
|
| Maybe I've been listening to too many podcasts and I'm jaded but
| when people selling the ideas and their entire business model is
| constantly pushing out new ideas and interviewing thought leaders
| at some point quality content drops off and the pressure to
| publish probably makes the content suspect. Not sure I'm
| describing this right but just something I've been noticing
| lately.
| ncfausti wrote:
| I think this is just the nature of the "buffet of information"
| we currently enjoy. As in a restaurant, if you keep eating, no
| matter how good the food might be, you'll get sick of it
| eventually.
|
| You don't have to read them all. At some point (after much
| learning and preparation of course) we all have to decide to be
| our own guide; to trust our own intuition and primary research
| to know what's best for us.
|
| Each of us have incredibly unique backgrounds, experiences,
| goals, and values. Until we start to take action on the things
| that we really want to achieve, articles like these will
| eventually come to sound like the same tired platitudes. Check
| out Emerson's essay Self-Reliance if this resonates with you.
| (And yes I recognize the irony :) of my comment.)
| ducharmdev wrote:
| As problematic as academia is, that's kinda the idea behind
| tenure - to make the pursuit of research independent of
| economic incentives. Obviously this is not the case in practice
| with grants, the allure of industry jobs, low pay, etc., but I
| wonder if something similar could be achieved in a more
| contemporary context with platforms like Patreon.
| nickff wrote:
| Well, you seem to be tacitly assuming that those individuals
| have more interesting thoughts to contribute, but the market
| is somehow corrupting them, or misguiding them. It's also
| possible that each person only has so much to give, and is
| thereafter a spent force; tenure/patreon/other wouldn't
| change that.
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| You sure aren't. One of my buddies worked with an older woman
| who owned a bunch of self-help-y type business books, they were
| talking one day and she said, "You know, I noticed we all owned
| a bunch of these and it wasn't changing the way anyone worked."
| I thought that was pretty salient. The demand for ideas seems
| to be much more based on the satisfaction of novelty and being
| "in the know" and much less on actually utilizing any of it.
| These publishers try to feed that demand continuously, which is
| just kind of a ridiculous quirk of the human brain, and like
| any other irrational demand it has no inherent limit. So like
| you said they start scraping the bottom of the barrel.
| stocknoob wrote:
| The benefit of self-help can be like escapist fiction, except
| the protagonist isn't Luke Skywalker or Frodo but you,
| yourself.
| snapcore wrote:
| It seems to me, self-help is mostly just people spouting
| ideas with little scientific backing anyway. People get
| caught up in famous person X wrote this book. It seems like
| sometimes the person is actually knowledgeable like Jordan
| Peterson given their credentials for instance, but then they
| just draw conclusions that don't follow, make logical leaps,
| write platitudes, state common sense, etc.
|
| Also it requires a lot of conscious effort to change the
| patterns that make up yourself. The first step is to learn
| that skill. It seems like that is where everyone mostly
| fails.
|
| Ironically, I could write a self-help book/blog using these
| observations and present myself as an authority, but I
| realize these are just my opinions.
| Aerroon wrote:
| It's likely that self-help books do help some people, but
| only some. The disconnect people have is probably a result
| of different self-help books being suitable for different
| people in a way that we have a hard time defining. Eg
| imagine a self-help book catered towards introverts.
| Extroverts might not find it all that helpful, but be
| unable to realize why, yet their (introvert) friend swears
| that it was enormously helpful. Some (small) group of
| people feel that the book was helpful to them. They got
| that kick from it that started their engine. Another group
| might get it from another book.
|
| Combine this with people liking new things and I think it
| explains a significant part of the self-help book industry.
| And why do people write them? Money, but also the same
| reason we write comments here. It somehow _feels_ good to
| share your opinion, regardless whether you say you 're an
| authority or are just sharing an opinion you're not
| completely sure of.
| tenkabuto wrote:
| Yeah, I had similar feelings about the self-help/personal
| development/business "literature" space, and it drove me
| towards learning more about philosophy. A big thing that
| frustrated me was a lack of critical thinking, especially
| attempts to understand or reconcile why seemingly
| contradicting principles each seem reasonable and effective
| in similar situations. (Given seemingly the same situation,
| book A says X is the correct approach to take, but book B
| says (seemingly) not-X is the correct approach.)
|
| I think there should be a sort of academic-esque literature
| (in the sense of journals and critique) that analyzes these
| things.
| swyx wrote:
| exactly - the kind of people who these posts admire don't
| actually read these posts. I called this the Metacreator
| Ceiling https://www.swyx.io/meta-creator-ceiling/
| andbberger wrote:
| I couldn't be bothered to read your post so I took it upon
| myself to write a blog post I like to call "Self-awareness
| and the meta-meta-creator ceiling"
| jxramos wrote:
| A related set of advice from a Nobel laureate:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5198756/
| giantg2 wrote:
| My advice is either make as much money as possible, or find a job
| you enjoy even if you're poor.
|
| Most of this feel good talk from companies (or schools) are
| either lies or promises they can't deliver on. Be skeptical.
| ggm wrote:
| Having been guilty of "can we try another algorithm" which is
| only one remove from p-jacking, I think we need to encourage more
| negative results publication. We need to incentivise and reward
| it.
|
| There should be a way to get tenure on it, at least partially.
| roenxi wrote:
| It is too easy to churn out negative results though. If someone
| were to hit this at an incentives level, I think it might be
| fruitful to require that anyone getting tenure has to have had
| a major study replicated by an independent researcher. That'd
| have complicated ramifications and probably encourage a very
| insular community.
| abnry wrote:
| That would improve incentives for those trying to get tenure,
| but what are the incentives for the replicators? That seems
| to be the biggest problem. It costs money, time, and with the
| current incentive structure, reputation.
| mhh__ wrote:
| I think some lower pressure medium for publication could work.
| Publishing every attempt that didn't work would be tedious, but
| a database of attempts, implementation, and results would allow
| others to not walk into the same bog
| inter_netuser wrote:
| 10x bonus for every disproven dogma.
| veddox wrote:
| "Dogmas" are pretty much never disproven. (Technically,
| outside of mathematics, they _can 't_ be.)
|
| Science is a long process of lots of people looking at lots
| of data and coming up with different explanations to make
| sense of it all. Some of these explanations make more sense
| than others, but it's pretty much guaranteed that even the
| experts won't be able to agree on which ones. As new data and
| new generations of researchers emerge, the explanations
| evolve, consolidate, and sometimes are discarded again. In
| short: science is a mess of opinions, gradually moving along.
|
| If you want to get a feel for what that looks like in
| practice, have a look at this blog post about diverging
| opinions in ecology:
| https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2018/04/30/poll-
| results... (Most of the hypotheses he explores are current
| "textbook knowledge"!)
| wombatpm wrote:
| A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its
| opponents and making them see the light, but rather because
| its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up
| that is familiar with it. . . . An important scientific
| innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over
| and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul
| becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents
| gradually die out, and that the growing generation is
| familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another
| instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.
|
| -- Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97
| fabian2k wrote:
| The problem is that good negative results are also a lot of
| effort to achieve. You need to figure out if you have a real
| negative result, and not just some error or mistake in your
| experiments. And spending that additional effort when the
| result by itself is not interesting might not be justified.
| vixen99 wrote:
| My favourite: "I cannot give any scientist of any age better
| advice than this: the intensity of the conviction that a
| hypothesis is true has no bearing of whether it is true or not."
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I was surprised to see the Irish famine alluded to. It is still a
| common misconception that the Irish were too dependent on the
| potato:
|
| https://mises.org/library/what-caused-irish-potato-famine
| jleyank wrote:
| People in general: Understand basic statistics and risk
| estimates. Know how to balance a checkbook. Have an open mind and
| be careful when dealing with "experts". Such people are not the
| same as "knowledgeable people"...
|
| Young scientists: I assume this means PhD in a scientific or
| biomedical field. Those with the latter could go into medical
| work, which requires empathy and an ability to handle stress.
| Either of these could go into academic work, which requires luck,
| a publication record and the ability to secure funding.
|
| For those interested in "working", (reasonably) strong computer
| chops are becoming a necessity. One either works with
| professional developers, handles the output from such or become
| professional developers themselves. Appreciating the data that is
| created, its limitations and how to participate in and run a
| project (people skills, too) are critical. There's a number of
| scientific developers reaching retirement, and the codes they
| maintain and expand need new people or we need new alternatives.
|
| Finally, if you're a rock star interested in
| scientific/biomedical works, get enough background to understand
| the jargon and nomenclature of these fields. Trust me, dealing
| with chemists without knowing proper nomenclature makes them
| think you're an idiot. Yeah, there are translators in the middle
| but better to not need one. Remember Egan's Rule - the number of
| failures before the project ignores you is 1.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| As a semi side note, in Adam Grant's latest book "Think Again" he
| often uses the phrase:
|
| "Think like a scientist."
|
| https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/think-again--the-power-of-know...
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