[HN Gopher] Negative incentives in academic research
___________________________________________________________________
Negative incentives in academic research
Author : ibobev
Score : 113 points
Date : 2022-07-21 16:13 UTC (6 hours ago)
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| quantum_mcts wrote:
| I generally disagree with the premise that scientists are
| becoming less productive. (To me, the complaints that there are
| no more grand fundamental discoveries is alike to complaining
| that we are not discovering any new continents on Earth...)
|
| On the subject of incentives in academia - reflecting on my
| academia run, I've noticed that I was the most creatively
| productive when I had a longer planning horizon in front of me.
| It was either at the beginning of a several-years position. Or at
| the very end when I knew that I'm leaving and didn't care
| anymore. The least productive was the sequence of one-year
| postdocs - when I was constantly worrying about the next one.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > the most creatively productive when I had a longer planning
| horizon
|
| I feel the same way. I've never been in academia, but
| everything he said matches the negative incentive structures
| I've always seen in the corporate world. For the most part, the
| incentive structures are designed to catch cheaters (or
| "slackers"), but since actually discovering and creating
| something is virtually indistinguishable from "slacking", it
| just doesn't get done.
| naikrovek wrote:
| > To me, the complaints that there are no more grand
| fundamental discoveries is alike to complaining that we are not
| discovering any new continents on Earth...
|
| anyone of any era could claim this. and many did. yet here we
| are, still discovering things, and not discovering new
| continents.
|
| it is folly to assume that we have discovered everything, or
| even a small fraction of everything.
|
| I think you will find that it is difficult to find someone who
| has been vetted by a system who would be open to admitting that
| said system is fundamentally flawed, especially when successful
| passage through that system grants things that those who have
| been through it want to have, such as academia does.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I 100% agree that academia is flawed. But I think the reason
| we're not making grand fundamental discoveries is that the
| "low-hanging fruit" was already done.
|
| We definitely haven't discovered everything, and we're
| actually making way more discoveries much faster than people
| back then. But the things which are easy or even "not super
| hard" to discover have already been discovered. Most of the
| discoveries require background knowledge or are more "niche"
| things, because discoveries which are really big and affect
| everyone are easy to find and going to have everyone
| searching for them.
|
| In fact we _could_ maybe discover a new continent. But it
| would have to be tiny or underwater or camouflaged or
| otherwise have some reason that despite having a map of the
| whole Earth and satellites everywhere, we haven 't discovered
| it yet. When Columbus "discovered" America there weren't
| nearly as many ships floating around as there are
| boats/planes/satellites today.
| simonsarris wrote:
| > I generally disagree with the premise that scientists are
| becoming less productive.
|
| Do you believe the average academic research paper or project
| written/done today is of the same quality or better as the
| average in 1980, or 1950?
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I can't speak to all science, but I am a CS (cryptography)
| researcher and routinely read papers from the 1980s. The
| level of rigor and quality of my field's papers has
| _absolutely_ improved, by leaps and bounds. The formal
| definitions in those early papers are often non-existent (and
| sometimes wrong in retrospect) and the proposed constructions
| are often much simpler (and sometimes subtly wrong in
| retrospect.) And the number of papers has increased by at
| least an order of magnitude.
|
| On the flip side, those early papers contain the most
| fundamental discoveries in our field: you're only going to
| invent RSA or blind signatures or zero knowledge once. It's
| possible all those researchers were much smarter than we are
| now. (I grant this!) But there are a lot of absolutely
| brilliant people I know today. Alternatively, the lower-
| hanging fruit is all gone and the problems have become much
| harder.
| amelius wrote:
| > Alternatively, the lower-hanging fruit is all gone and
| the problems have become much harder.
|
| Reminds me of a patent officer who said in 1899 that
| "everything that can be invented has been invented."
| dekhn wrote:
| What's amusing about my field is that while much of the
| rigor was lost (computational biology in the 90s was very
| CS-rigorous), what we've learned is that deep networks beat
| any human features, none of the rigors of chomsky hierarchy
| really matter to find interesting biology, and you don't
| even need to know how to differentiate because that's
| automatic now.
| cmontella wrote:
| > you're only going to invent RSA or blind signatures or
| zero knowledge once.
|
| Well, maybe. Sometimes things that are discovered are lost
| or go completely unnoticed, so progress is not always
| monotonic. For example, for a long time it was believed
| that John William Strutt first documented dynamic soaring
| [1] in birds in the 1800s, but just recently (2018) it was
| found that actually none other than Leonardo DaVinci
| documented the phenomena in his notebooks centuries before
| [2]. People just didn't notice or forgot, despite those
| documents being some of the most poured over in history.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_soaring
|
| [2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.201
| 8.002...
| mmsimanga wrote:
| Sometimes people just aren't ready for new knowledge or
| they don't know enough to understand it. I see this when
| new person enters an industry, healthcare in my case. It
| takes about a year to understand the nuances between
| healthcare providers, funders and administrators. I am
| guessing people read what Leonardo wrote but they just
| didn't understand the significance.
| virissimo wrote:
| Good point. The same thing definitely happens in physics
| too. For example, people attributed important advances in
| mathematical physics (such as the mean speed theorem) to
| Galileo despite them having been already developed
| extensively in the middle ages.
| jules wrote:
| I can only talk about computer science. The research papers
| in the past would probably not be able to get published in
| prestigious journals today. They'd need to get expanded from
| sketchy 8 page papers into very rigorous 25 page papers. I
| think we've overshot though. With papers in the modern style
| you need to wade through a lot of cruft to get to the key
| idea. As for the quality of the ideas...the older papers do
| win. I think that's because there was more low hanging fruit,
| but some part of it may be due to an incentive structure that
| rewards safe bets.
| seydor wrote:
| Technically - yes. But it 's just that, a paper. Back then ,
| people were chasing glory, not "the paper" because papers
| didnt matter, that s why so many of them were too short,
| unreferenced etc. Science was small and more personal. Now
| it's an impersonal industry and science is a product. Science
| gets a lot of underserved respect out of inertia, but it
| really is a big industry sector now.
| quantum_mcts wrote:
| > quality
|
| What do you mean by that? Good writing? Good rigor? Good
| research work? Have a fundamental discovery? There are not as
| correlated as one expects.
| bowsamic wrote:
| In terms of writing and quality of research methodology, far
| higher in my experience
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| > the complaints that there are no more grand fundamental
| discoveries is alike to complaining that we are not discovering
| any new continents on Earth.
|
| And this is a very real issue, for instance in physics. It
| means that if you go for research there, it is likely to be
| meh.
|
| I did my PhD in physics, I was thankfully at a moment where
| simulations and ML were just starting so I could have fun.
| There was exactly zero interesting discoveries in
| nuclear/atomic/particle during my time in academia. And the 40
| years before.
|
| Compare this with 1090-1950. These years were simply incredible
| (especially the ones around 1900, to ~1920). You had almost
| every day discoveries that were shaking the world, and everyone
| was aware of that.
|
| This is not the fault of the scientists, this is just that the
| world is like this. It is indeed like complaining that there
| are no more continents, but then the reasonable thing to do it
| to invest more in teaching, or applied science.
| justinclift wrote:
| > 1090
|
| 1900 yeah?
| psi75 wrote:
| _I generally disagree with the premise that scientists are
| becoming less productive._
|
| This one's tricky to measure. If you go by the number of words
| published, they're a lot more productive than they used to be.
| Ten papers won't even get you tenure. In terms of metrics, the
| game is a lot more competitive.
|
| I would argue that the bigger problem is that academic science
| is now _consumptive_. Think of all those tuitions dollars the
| universities get because they run a protection racket over
| (what 's left of) the middle class job market. Now consider how
| terrible the academic job market has been for the past 30
| years, and that professors who want even a chance of getting
| respect basically need to self-fund by getting grants. Lots of
| money is going in, and how much is coming out? Something, for
| sure, but is it worth it? Or is it like U.S. healthcare, where
| we're paying 4x for a not terrible but merely acceptable
| product?
|
| _I was the most creatively productive when I had a longer
| planning horizon in front of me._
|
| Right, and this kind of opportunity has gone extinct, due to
| the hypercompetitive culture you get as our society disinvests
| itself in research and as funding becomes harder to find and
| more winner-take-all. If the neoliberals have their way, being
| a professor will just be another next-quarter focused corporate
| job within ten years.
| wumpus wrote:
| > If the neoliberals have their way,
|
| Not sure where that came from. The NSF provides a lot of 3 or
| 5 year grants. The science org I work for is mostly funded by
| 3-5 year grants.
| elashri wrote:
| My supervisor told me recently that it is very risky to focus
| on breakthrough topics except when you are doing PhD or if your
| are tenured. probably less true for PhD if you don't have
| ambitious PI. The demand for publications and results that is
| mainly the way to evaluate you starting from postdoc until
| tenure promotion is very tense. People usually try to do many
| things and stretch themselves. sometimes this even lead to
| burnout and many people leave academia for that adding to the
| very competitive and low gain opportunities available in most
| academic field.
|
| To be honest, I really think that we have wrong metric. Most
| importantly, if you try to ignore them even if you get some
| local support within your group. Good luck getting any fund
| because funding agencies evaluation have the same problems.
| crikeyjoe wrote:
| psi75 wrote:
| Man, I wish I could use my real name for this reply, but for
| political reasons I can't (in fact, I change my username
| regularly) because I have a lot of insight into this problem, why
| it exists, and why it probably won't get better barring a
| complete overhaul of our socioeconomic system and the myriad
| corrupt institutions that support it.
|
| We live in an age of institutional decline and it is severe. You
| see this in (trade) publishing. Your publisher no longer builds
| your reputation; the publisher has pushed that responsibility
| unto the author. The ones who already have the personal resources
| necessary to market their books get further validation and
| credibility; the ones who don't will go unheard. Academia's the
| same way: universities no longer provide funding for people of
| excellence; rather, they have put the onus of funding on the
| professors themselves--you'll get more funding (and published in
| better places) on account of using their name, and for that they
| take a cut. The relationship has inverted; rather than nurturing
| emerging talent, these institutions _are nurtured by_ emerging
| talent, and this vampirism is sustainable because those talented
| people have no other choice insofar as all the other institutions
| are failing at approximately the same right.
|
| Consequently, we have widespread duplicated effort, channel-
| flooding due to metrics-gaming (gotta get that h-index into the
| three digits before tenure time) and a corporatized, mediocre
| culture in which agreeability (negatively correlated with
| excellence and conscientiousness) matters far too much and
| salesmen run the day.
|
| Historically, there were nations of priests and nations of
| warriors and nations of farmers. We've become a nation of
| sellers; but we no longer have much to sell but our own talk.
|
| I don't know, for sure, how to solve this. Anyone who pays
| attention can see that capitalism (which invariably becomes
| corporate capitalism) is a dead end at a 21st-century technology
| level... but of course the eradication of capital is merely a
| necessary, not a sufficient, condition for scientific excellence.
| Going socialist is mandatory if we want to fix this, but alone
| does not guarantee much--there are a lot of cultural changes that
| probably need to happen before we can build healthy institutions
| again.
| fnovd wrote:
| >Going socialist is mandatory if we want to fix this
|
| Of course, the lede is buried exactly where expected. How novel
| an idea it is that the the system is separable from its
| components and that utopia is indeed achievable if only the
| rest of the world would wake up and learn to serve your idea of
| a higher purpose. The inevitable counterpoint is that the
| system is responding predictably and efficaciously to a change
| to its environment: more undergraduate funding leads to more
| students pursuing graduate degrees and a greater deal of
| competition in the academic space. The "problem" is self-
| correcting. It turns out science doesn't need happy scientists.
|
| The reason why you don't attach your name to comments like this
| is because your possession of a name worth attaching would
| preclude this comment from existing.
| bowsamic wrote:
| > The reason why you don't attach your name to comments like
| this is because your possession of a name worth attaching
| would preclude this comment from existing.
|
| Socialists are actually oppressed in many countries
| psi75 wrote:
| zackmorris wrote:
| This comment is spot-on. We've traded actual productivity for
| the appearance of productivity as thrift.
|
| Yes that's primarily due to capitalism, specifically
| neoliberalism, crony capitalism and late-stage capitalism.
|
| Unfortunately socialism isn't enough to save us, because even
| democratic socialism demands full employment, which is
| increasingly at odds with automation and UBI.
|
| I don't believe that we have come up with a system yet that
| incentivizes the kind of one-off revolutionary invention that
| most of us got into programming for in the first place. The
| kind of economy where a single invention frees millions of
| people from forced labor.
|
| Sergey and Larry come up with PageRank and suddenly everyone
| wants their search engine and they're set for life. Google wins
| the internet lottery and keeps all of the trillions of dollars.
| What about the rest of us? We invent something and our business
| fails due to long-tail effects and we die broke. 90% of
| businesses fail in their first year. So it's becoming
| increasingly competitive as tech improves - the ultimate tragic
| result. Which self-evidently trends toward a crisis of techno-
| capitalism in the future: The Singularity. Probably the last
| failure in human history.
|
| We're looking at a situation by the end of the decade where one
| guy generates an entire movie from notes scribbled on a napkin
| with some future variation of DALL-E 2 and makes a million
| dollars. Meanwhile another guy who doesn't have the right
| connections spends his life working in the service industry as
| a wage slave.
|
| Meaning that the most likely indicator of someone's success is
| a coin flip as we enter this era of neo-fuedalism.
|
| Meaning that civil unrest and violence are all but inevitable
| now (just turn on the TV to see it everywhere).
|
| Now, I think a lot of people on HN and the world at large have
| not tried working for themselves, so have no idea how hard
| money is to come by. Sure, we can make a quarter million
| dollars every year working 40+ hour weeks at a FAANG company.
| But make that from a personal project? Highly unlikely.
|
| Writing this now, I have given up on a solution to this coming
| from the top. People close to me, even the majority of people
| on HN, don't seem to get it. They'll never get it. Something in
| the idea of UBI irks them deep down inside, just like with
| student loan forgiveness. So it's over.
|
| On a personal level, I'm looking towards solarpunk and local
| cooperatives that create resource streams for people outside of
| the financial incentive. I think it's possible to invent robot
| kits that provide things like hydroponic produce for very low
| cost. Once people have their basic needs met, it liberates them
| from having to beg for grants or even a job. Which is why the
| entire status quo is geared against this. Rents and basic
| expenses will squeeze us even harder before the end. Expect
| crushing regulations against off-grid living, just like how
| rain barrels have been criminalized in the southwestern US.
| idiot900 wrote:
| I'm an assistant professor in a medical school in the US and
| agree in general with the article. It takes an absurd amount of
| time to write a grant application, time that could be spent doing
| science - but we faculty don't have any choice if we want to
| continue our careers.
| ray__ wrote:
| I am the first grad student of an assistant professor
| (chemistry/biology). Seeing her writing workload has made me a
| lot less enthusiastic about being a professor myself. I like
| writing about science, but the constant treading water
| mentality makes it difficult to 1) find the mental space to be
| creative and 2) take the risks that are often necessary for
| innovation, especially since the careers of your trainees are
| on the line. The kicker is that most grant writing isn't even
| about science. Good luck with your lab!
| lurkervizzle wrote:
| Same exact experience - I finished my CS PhD in 2005 and
| thought I would go into academia, but decided not to given
| how much of academia seemed to be just writing grant
| proposals vs. actual research.
|
| FWIW, also decided not to go into academia because of how
| much smarter I realized I needed to be to be a top tier
| academic!
| bachmeier wrote:
| > if grant applications are valued enough (e.g., needed to get
| promotion), scientists may be willing to spend even more time
| than is rational to do so
|
| This isn't worded properly. It's clearly rational _for the
| scientists_ to spend time on the pursuit of grants. Otherwise
| they wouldn 't be doing it.
|
| $100 in grant money is not the same as $100 in university income.
| In fact, the whole point of the grant is to cover the cost of
| doing research, and in principle should leave the university's
| net revenue unchanged. (In practice, overhead changes that, but
| that's a different topic.)
|
| The problem is that the university's objective is to spend as
| much on research as possible. Grant money is simply the fuel for
| that process. All else equal, more expensive research is very
| strongly preferred, because that increases research spending, and
| that improves the standing of the university.
|
| That is a seriously distorted set of incentives. All perfectly
| rational. Just insanely stupid.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| > It's clearly rational for the scientists to spend time on the
| pursuit of grants. Otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.
|
| This is one of the reasons why I left academia. The insane run
| for grants was just starting and i said that I do not have any
| intent do do that.
|
| I was a _scientist_. Doing science. Not filling in papers and
| going to belly dancing shows.
|
| When I was told that this is compulsory and nobody else is
| going to do it, I sad good bye and left for the industry. I was
| earning 10x more, had no worries about funding or copier paper.
| Plenty of my friends did it and then academia was crying
| because of the brains drain and how unfair it was. The salme
| who said that grats are compulsory (they were sitting in the
| various jurys to accept them, instead of doing science)
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > It's clearly rational for the scientists to spend time on the
| pursuit of grants. Otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.
|
| Is _that_ worded properly? Are you really saying that nobody
| would ever do something irrational?
|
| If that's not what you mean, then we have to look at what
| "rational" means here. I think parent didn't mean "rational" in
| the sense of "maximising personal gain", but "maximising output
| of quality research".
| ISL wrote:
| I agree with point #1, but disagree with point #2.
|
| Academic research is not a place to go for extrinsic motivation.
| If you're not primarily in it for love, you're going to have a
| bad time.
|
| An example: Who has heard of the Wolf Prize in physics? It is in
| the set of prizes known as "second prize to the Nobel Prize", yet
| essentially nobody outside of the field will react with, "Whoa,
| she won a Wolf Prize? She must be really good."
|
| Even in the well-resourced research groups, researchers will be
| find much better extrinsic reward outside of academia. Advancing
| the boundaries of our understanding is priceless intrinsic
| motivation for those who can find a way to stay, but doing so
| requires substantial sacrifice -- more than many of those in
| academia realize.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Extrinsic here means "extrinsic to self", not "extrinsic to
| academia". There's plenty of "extrinsic" motivation within
| academia.
|
| When you go to top universities, you'll find plenty of
| academics who are extrinsically motivated:
|
| * Number of research papers
|
| * Cumulative value of grants
|
| * Awards
|
| * Titles. This was insane. Apparently being a Fellow of the
| IEEE wasn't enough, so they actively sought becoming Fellows in
| adjacent societies.
| zekrioca wrote:
| > Extrinsic here means "extrinsic to self", not "extrinsic to
| academia". There's plenty of "extrinsic" motivation within
| academia.
|
| Yes, I've also understood it this way.
| sycren wrote:
| Earlier this year I was exploring a web3 industry 4.0 open
| science solution rethinking how research is performed, by who (or
| what), skills required, deliverables (no journals needed), a
| semantic knowledge base of results good & bad, validated through
| repetition, a framework for how experiments are managed.
|
| Here's my research on the 'Challenges facing Academic Research' -
| https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOkNfljM=/?share_link_id=58427...
|
| Quotes that I found important:
|
| "It discourages rigorous research as it is difficult to obtain
| enough results for a paper (and hence progress) in two to three
| years.
|
| The constant stress drives otherwise talented and intelligent
| people out of science also."
|
| - Anonymous
|
| "End the PhD or drastically change it. there is a high level of
| depression among phd students. long hours, limited career
| prospects, and low wages contribute to this emotion."
|
| - Don Gibson, Scientist at BioConsortia
|
| Funding "affects what we study, what we publish, the risks we
| (frequently don't) take, it nudges us to emphasise safe,
| predictable (read: fundable) science"
|
| - Gary Bennett - Neuroscientist at Duke University
|
| "We need to recognise academic journals for what they are: shop
| windows for incomplete descriptions of research, that make semi-
| arbitrary editorial [judgments] about what to publish and often
| have harmful policies that restrict access to important post-
| publication critical appraisal of published research." --Ben
| Goldacre, The Datalab, epidemiology researcher, physician, and
| author
|
| "An estimated $200 billion - or the equivalent of 85% of global
| spending on research - is routinely wasted on poorly designed and
| redundant studies." -
| https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
|
| "As much as 30% of the most influential original medical research
| papers turn out to be wrong or exaggerated." -
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/201218#COM...
|
| "The BMJ found that one-third of university press releases
| contained either exaggerated claims of causation (when the study
| itself only suggested correlation), unwarranted implications
| about animal studies for people, or unfounded health advice." -
| https://www.vox.com/2014/12/10/7372921/health-journalism-sci...
| zekrioca wrote:
| I agree, specially with the 2nd point. You can see this in
| virtually every academic institution where researchers will find
| all ways to simply "plot" good results, i.e., beat the data until
| you find what you want. The intrinsic value of the research is
| nearly 0, because all that matters is to get things published to
| attract citations that will help them in getting promotions and
| prizes.
| mpweiher wrote:
| It goes beyond grants and extrinsic motivation...well maybe the
| latter category is pretty much all-encompassing.
|
| Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker talked about this at
| length here:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJFKl_5JTnA
|
| Some points:
|
| - Original (risky) research is detrimental and likely fatal to a
| career in science
|
| - Actually creating systems doubly so
| psi75 wrote:
| > _Original (risky) research is detrimental and likely fatal to
| a career in science_
|
| Although it's trite to blame Boomers for complex problems, I
| actually think the fall of academia is a case where one
| generation can be blamed. They're the reason risky research
| makes you unemployable. They're the reason you have to play it
| safe and make nice with king-makers who control the journals
| that decide your reputation (because no one's ever going to
| actually read your work closely enough to understand it).
|
| The university had a social contract. Teaching was something
| professors did that merited a middle-class salary; research was
| also important, but impossible to evaluate, due to these
| contributions having zero extractible economic value in the
| median case. You taught so the future decision-makers would
| consider you and your field relevant; you researched to advance
| the field. You taught to justify your salary and to promote
| your discipline's general relevance to society; you researched
| to justify your access to the highly-paid, part-time teaching
| gig. That was the deal.
|
| The Boomers were the generation to cop the attitude that
| research was the only labor that actually mattered (the "male
| work" of academia) and that teaching ("female work") was low-
| value incidental labor they simply got stuck with. They started
| giving their teaching the bare minimum. Society took notice of
| the shift in their attitude. Universities increased class
| sizes, and they started using low-paid adjuncts and graduate
| students for the labor. It turned out that they didn't
| professors (i.e. research experts) to teach Calc 2 after all.
| No surprise here, the demand for professors dropped, and the
| only ones who can get in now are those who can convince others
| --before they have the freedom necessary to achieve much at all
| in research--that _their research alone_ merits a (low) six-
| figure income.
|
| In 2022, evaluating original research is harder than ever, due
| to hyperspecialization. For a typical Ph.D. thesis, there are
| less than five people in the world qualified to evaluate
| whether it's worthy of a tenure-track position. Consequently,
| actualities matter less; the gaming of publication metrics and
| salesmanship matter a lot more.
|
| This one actually can be blamed on the Boomers (although the
| Xers and Millennials have failed thus far to fix it). They did
| this. Teaching is what kept them relevant and respected... and
| when they started blowing it off, society began to question as
| well whether their research was really worth the investment
| either. It didn't take long before state legislators (poorly
| educated by professors who'd devalued teaching) and turncoat
| administrators turned the professorial job market into what it
| is today.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Please: do not assign the cause of something toa group of
| anonymous and unverifiable people. This always end badly.
| Always.
|
| And there are more non-graduate boomers than graduate ones.
| psi75 wrote:
| I thought it was clear that I was not blaming an entire
| generation but, specifically, the much smaller set of Baby
| Boomers who held positions of power either inside academia
| or in sectors that have influence over it.
|
| As people, I don't think those born between 1943 and 1964
| ("Boomers") are any worse or better than anyone else;
| historical forces explain a lot more than putative
| generational character. Alas, the Boomers' middle age
| corresponded in time with some really terrible people
| rising into positions of leadership, to such an extent that
| their generation's name has become synonymous with
| dysfunctions in which the vast majority of people born
| during that time, in fact, played no part.
| gspr wrote:
| > In 2022, evaluating original research is harder than ever,
| due to hyperspecialization. For a typical Ph.D. thesis, there
| are less than five people in the world qualified to evaluate
| whether it's worthy of a tenure-track position.
|
| That's simply not true for a _typical_ PhD thesis at all. It
| certainly doesn 't jive with my own experience, so I'd like
| to cough up a few examples please.
|
| (Do hyperspecialized PhD theses like the one you describe
| exist? Certainly! But I refute the idea that such these are
| _typical_.)
| Tostino wrote:
| What timestamp on that talk if you don't mind?
| jrumbut wrote:
| I'm far from convinced that science is less productive as a whole
| than it was in 1900, though I'm sure the average scientist today
| isn't as productive as Max Planck (but of course he was above
| average in his own day as well).
|
| Something I think would help the incentive situation is providing
| more incentives for teaching and service. My grandfather was a
| professor emeritus and I can't find any record of him authoring a
| research paper (or a PhD thesis for that matter) but even 30+
| years since he last taught I still run into people who rave about
| the formative experiences they had in his classes. He's a minor
| celebrity among local engineers of a certain age.
|
| Such a person could still provide a lot of value, but it's harder
| to measure.
| mmmmpancakes wrote:
| That's a nice story, but teaching =/= research and I fail to
| see how this is related to research productivity. If anything
| the relation is inverse because, as you said, he doesn't have a
| publication record, so from the perspective of research he was
| basically useless.
|
| If we are trying to improve research productivity, then
| removing or dramatically reducing teaching responsibilities for
| researchers sounds a lot more sensible. Besides, modern
| pedagogy is getting increasingly complicated and having
| teaching specialists can be much more beneficial to your
| average 1-2 year undergrad.
|
| Not to diminish his teaching career, it sounds very valuable,
| but not in a way that's directly relevant to the OP.
| jrumbut wrote:
| It's simple! Grant applications are so hard because they are
| so competitive. They are so competitive because a lot of
| people want to be professors. Currently, to succeed as a
| professor you need a research grant.
|
| If, instead, we made it easier to advance your career as
| exactly the kind of pedagogy specialist you described (as
| well as through leadership in professional organizations,
| work in the community, and all the other kinds of service), I
| believe you would get fewer applications to those research
| grants. It might result in better post-secondary education as
| well.
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