[HN Gopher] Good Science Project
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Good Science Project
Author : how-about-this
Score : 37 points
Date : 2022-04-19 23:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (goodscienceproject.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (goodscienceproject.org)
| btrettel wrote:
| > There are arguably too many people being trained as graduate
| students and post-docs compared to the number of academic
| positions available.
|
| Is there anything actually being done to solve this problem? Note
| that I'd include stable research positions in government and
| industry in addition to stable academic positions.
|
| Don't get me wrong. It's nice to see more people talking about
| this problem, but talking about it alone won't solve it.
| dguest wrote:
| They seem to be taking issue with the "up or out" mentality of
| academia, and it's hard to fix academic mentality without
| talking about it and trying to change people's minds.
|
| I don't know how effective it will be, but it is a problem:
| Imagine a police department that fires everyone after 8 years
| total work experience, unless they are promoted to chief. It
| sounds ridiculous, but we typically hold on to researchers for
| a 5 year PhD + a 3-5 year postdoc. After that the expectation
| is that they should run their own group.
| btrettel wrote:
| > Imagine a police department that fires everyone after 8
| years total work experience, unless they are promoted to
| chief. It sounds ridiculous, but we typically hold on to
| researchers for a 5 year PhD + a 3-5 year postdoc. After that
| the expectation is that they should run their own group.
|
| I love this analogy.
| fladd wrote:
| The problem is that those in charge disagree with that. When I
| brought this up after a recent policy change at my department
| to not allow hiring own PhDs as postdocs (because they should
| go to another lab, as this is what your CV is expected to look
| like), I was told that a Phd programme should not be seen as a
| path towards an academic research career. In contrast, I was
| told that it is very important to train as many PhD students as
| possible, that all don't stay in academia, so they can bring
| scientific thinking to all areas of society. Unfortunately,
| starting PhD students, of which 99% do this explicitly to do
| research, are not aware of this, and neither do PhD programmes
| offer any specific training for a non-academic career.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| One solution would be to push more people towards MS degrees,
| which should be no more than 2-3 years in duration and
| focused on gaining skills and experience valuable in the
| private sector.
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| boredumb wrote:
| Foremost this is very cool and hope you guys the best.
|
| Reading through the "High-Risk, High-Reward Research" page I do
| find myself wondering the moral aspects that this brings up.
| Golden Ticket holders being able to get funding for what ever
| they want even when other reviewers disagree is great, but what
| kind of governance takes place over legal grey areas or things
| that are ahead of current legislation and falls into an ethical
| dilemma?
| ruaraidh wrote:
| "high-risk, high-reward" science sounds great, until you suddenly
| have a replication crisis on your hands. Big, exciting results
| already attract more attention than good, careful, journeyman
| science, despite generally being, well, wrong.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| There's a serious omission in this organizations list of
| concerns, namely the increasing control of academic research by
| corporate interests and the resulting attack on traditional
| academic norms of open sharing of research results. See the 2005
| text by J. Washburn, "University Inc: The corporate corruption of
| higher education" (intro):
|
| http://kropfpolisci.com/higher.education.washburn.pdf
|
| > "The problem is not university-industry relationships per se;
| it is the elimination of any clear boundary lines separating
| academia from commerce. Today, market forces are dictating what
| is happening in the world of higher education as never before,
| causing universities to engage in commercial activities unheard
| of in academia a mere generation ago. Universities now routinely
| operate complex patenting and licensing operations to market
| their faculty's inventions (extracting royalty income and other
| fees in return). They invest their endowment money in risky
| start-up firms founded by their professors. They run their own
| industrial parks, venture-capital funds, and for- profit
| companies, and they publish newsletters encouraging faculty
| members to commercialize their research by going into business.
| Often, when a professor becomes the CEO of a new start- up, there
| is considerable overlap between the research taking place on
| campus and at the firm, a situation ripe for confusion and
| conflicts of interest. The question of who owns academic research
| has grown increasingly contentious, as the openness and sharing
| that once characterized university life has given way to a new
| proprietary culture more akin to the business world."
|
| These problems have only gotten worse in the past 15 years; a
| nice example is the remdesivir story (a Covid-19 treatment whose
| discovery was financed by taxpayers yet which ended up under the
| exclusive control of Gilead Inc.)
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-law-medic...
| codekilla wrote:
| Is the pitch directly to taxpayers? There have been lawsuits
| (by faculty even..including one in which the DOE was deposed)
| to rein in misappropriation of funds etc., but it seems like
| the agencies themselves don't care about conflicts of interest
| at these universities (and basically encourage them). Is it a
| research organization that says: 'Hey...we only do open source
| patents'?
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