[HN Gopher] A mental health crisis in science
___________________________________________________________________
A mental health crisis in science
Author : rntn
Score : 172 points
Date : 2023-05-23 13:08 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| taylodl wrote:
| Welcome to late stage capitalism. Our blue collar brethren have
| been put through the grinder for _decades._ Now it 's our turn.
| In the end the majority of the population will be simply burnt
| out - and to what end? To support the lavish lifestyle of a
| select few.
| jdlyga wrote:
| I grew up in a family of scientists and professors. It's really
| disheartening to see how much trouble it is to make a living
| nowadays. My grandfather was an entomology professor, and was
| able to support a wife, 3 kids, and a nice house though they were
| no means wealthy. If you can't support yourself or a family in
| 2023 working in academia, why would anyone pursue it as a career?
| baja_blast wrote:
| And this will lead to the a stagnation of science if the best
| and brightest disincentivized from participating.
| mtriassi wrote:
| This makes me wonder how much of this is because research
| typically happens in an academic setting versus this just being
| the nature of research.
|
| I wonder if researches from private companies feel the same woes.
| If so, its probably just the nature of, like others have
| mentioned, a deliverable / outcome based jobs. I'd imagine (and
| hope), that at the very least they're paid better and have more
| resources available to them.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| Others are hinting at the same thing, but toxic culture (by
| itself) is probably only part of the problem.
|
| If a single research job is toxic, that's stressful in the short
| term, but will just motivate someone to leave eventually; stress
| relieved.
|
| If the entire 'industry' is toxic, there's no job change that can
| relieve the stress. Also, research jobs are attained after people
| make some hard-to-reverse decisions about money, time investment,
| and lifestyle. If someone is in loads of student debt, has spent
| a decade learning a very niche topic that can't be easily
| leveraged elsewhere and doesn't have enough money to just quit
| and be okay, it's easy to see where the stress comes from, and it
| doesn't seem easily resolved.
| tptacek wrote:
| Whole research fields share this toxic culture; what people
| seem to do is leave their field entirely. Not to mention that,
| because of the way academic lab research works, people
| frequently take up jobs in locations where there is only one
| credible "employer" (there will of course be dozens of PIs, but
| it's institutional failures that allow abusive culture to take
| root).
| dbcooper wrote:
| This song sums up how awful most lab careers are better than any
| articles that I am aware of:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_bB3LBYG6E&list=RDQ_bB3LBYG...
|
| "You halted the march of progress."
| jamesash wrote:
| An early stage lab has a lot in common with a startup. The PI is
| given seed money to validate an ambitious idea and has limited
| time and resources to do it. The work is extremely labor
| intensive and in the early stages the PI will be in the trenches
| with the early employees working in the lab and setting an
| example for them to follow. Fast failure and pivots are extremely
| common. Furthermore, at any time the research idea could get
| scooped by another hard-working research lab, resulting in
| publication in a lower-tier journal. The PI must get early
| results that can be used to obtain further research grants. A
| good PI in this situation will set expectations accordingly that
| 60+ hour weeks will be required and hopefully those who are not
| willing to do so will self-deselect. From their perspective I
| completely not understand not wanting to invest $50k/year of
| their startup funds in a graduate student who is not putting in
| the necessary time to succeed. The prospective graduate student's
| maximum power is at the time when they are choosing a research
| advisor. Choose wisely, and remember you are always free to
| choose not to go if you don't see a good situation. I advise that
| people think long and hard about whether or not they truly want
| to do graduate school. There are far better ways to spend your
| 20's than in a lab. I had two great experiences in "intense" labs
| in my field (organic chemistry) after a very poor experience with
| a prestigious but absentee graduate advisor in another field -
| but it is definitely not for everyone.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > An early stage lab has a lot in common with a startup.
|
| The problem is you also see this behavior in well established
| lab, where the PI has very little to lose if he quits research
| altogether.
|
| In my experience, the correlation with whether the professor
| was an assistant professor seeking tenure vs a well established
| full professor and the amount of work they make PhD students do
| is almost nil. It's mostly purely driven by the will of the PI,
| not the demands of the funding situation. A lot of professors
| choose to have few graduate students so they don't have to
| stress too much about funding.
|
| Remember: Once you get tenure, your job is not at risk if your
| research output is low (although it does affect compensation).
| If you get a $1M grant and end up with no research papers out
| of it, there is _no_ accountability - except the granting
| agency will deprioritize you in the future (if even that).
|
| If you're seeking an advisor, ask his/her current students what
| life is like. Also find people who graduated under him/her and
| ask them.
| jamesash wrote:
| It's pick your poison, like choosing a startup vs BigCorp. My
| observations pertain to organic chemistry specifically, I'm
| less familiar with other fields.
|
| With an assistant prof you will be asked to do unreasonably
| long hours on ideas that haven't been fully validated, but
| you get a lot of face-time with the PI (for better or worse)
| and have a chance to get on the ground floor of a potentially
| great research program. Your boss has a lot more invested in
| your success because their career depends more on you. It can
| be exciting.
|
| With a more established prof you are more likely be plugged
| into the n-th iteration of an established research program.
| You're more expendable because the prof has more options to
| hire your replacement; you can get lost in the crowd; the
| prof won't be in the lab as much (travel, service
| responsibilities) so it's more sink or swim. Lots can go
| wrong in this environment. As the group gets larger, internal
| politics can create frictions, especially if the supervisor
| is away a lot.
|
| I see A) as better than B) but that is just me.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Yeah, it will vary with the discipline/major and possibly
| also the rank of the university. My point was that from
| what I've seen, the startup vs BigCorp dichotomy wasn't as
| clear cut as you describe. Also, there is the third
| category: Small business. Few grad students, and relatively
| low pressure.
| jamesash wrote:
| >Also, there is the third category: Small business. Few
| grad students, and relatively low pressure.
|
| These can be the saddest cases in my _opinion_. Lower
| downside, but lower upside too. You work your butt off
| and knock the ball out of the park with your project: who
| notices? A few experts, in a very narrow field, may
| recognize the significance of what you 've done. Can be
| lonely.
| tptacek wrote:
| This is the understandable part of researcher and grad student
| abuse and the sense I get talking to people is that they do
| indeed enter the field expecting to duck in on weekends to tend
| to experiments, and expecting not to be well compensated.
|
| The part that doesn't fit is their PIs being continuously
| abusive, or, worse, destructive: the PI's goals are ostensibly
| those of a supposed startup founder, to drive a team to the
| redline to get something delivered in an unreasonably short
| period of time, fair enough. But PIs deliberately fuck things
| up, disrupt experiments, chase team members out of the lab for
| no apparent reason, berate team members to the point where they
| can't be productive.
|
| The culture is much more reminiscent of a 1980s fine dining
| restaurant kitchen than of a startup. The chef paid his dues,
| and if having a pot half-filled with hot stock thrown at his
| head was something he had to deal with, by god, so will his
| line cooks and stages.
| jamesash wrote:
| Two most extreme stories I am most familiar with (did not
| experience first-hand) were of a PI throwing a chair in the
| direction of a postdoc, and of a PI having a screaming fit
| directly in the face of a graduate student. Both assistant
| profs.
|
| One got tenure and became more mellow in a relative sense.
| The other was subsequently unable to attract any more
| graduate students to their lab, and left for another,
| slightly less prestigious institution.
|
| I am also familiar with one case of graduate students
| resigning en masse, leaving a PI with a hollowed-out research
| group of 2-3 that they had to rebuild. Prof had a subsequent
| attitude adjustment.
|
| In all these cases the stories spread pretty quickly and
| profs realized that there were costs to abusive behavior.
| These stories pre-date social media BTW.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Rather than focusing on research, we should look at "careers that
| are considered prestigious or rewarding in themselves" : fashion,
| entertainment, sports, medicine, tenured teaching. In all of
| those, there are more applicants than there are jobs. Hence,
| lousy salaries and poor treatment.
|
| On the other hand, jobs that won't impress anyone you meet tend
| to have fewer applicants and much better treatment, because they
| can't afford to drive people away.
| nr2x wrote:
| It won't change until people quit. I did, I'm making way more
| money, way less stress, and I have no regrets.
| dbcooper wrote:
| A part of this is that in academia there are often few positive
| career rewards. You're under pressure to publish frequently, in
| high impact factor journals, and that is to _keep_ your job. You
| don 't get pay rises or bonuses, or any other career
| improvements, and job security can be until your next contract,
| at best. If you don't make it to tenured professor, and have good
| grant funding, then you are staring down the barrel of starting a
| new career at an older age and with few contacts.
|
| The place to start is by having far fewer PhD students, but more
| masters students and technicians. A 60% reduction in PhD student
| numbers would reflect job opportunities, and student aptitude,
| more accurately.
| currymj wrote:
| This would help on some level, although it would definitely
| make the stress on applicants much higher.
|
| E.g. there's increasingly an expectation that students should
| come into a PhD program with one or more publications already
| under their belt. For top programs ideally these should be
| first author (not yet an absolute requirement but it's more
| important each year).
|
| So you better get a good research assistant job as an undergrad
| so you can do that. It has to be early enough in undergrad that
| you have time to get the paper out before applying to grad
| school. So you need to be prepared to get a professor to work
| with you freshman/sophomore year...
|
| So you have to have evidence of skills basically coming in to
| undergrad. Either be really brilliant and stand out in class,
| or, better, have some experience in high school to make you
| credible...
|
| These pressures would only increase with fewer PhD slots. Maybe
| that's fine long term but it does have a distorting effect on
| people's lives if you have to make high stakes decisions that
| early.
| sage76 wrote:
| > there's increasingly an expectation that students should
| come into a PhD program with one or more publications already
| under their belt. For top programs ideally these should be
| first author (not yet an absolute requirement but it's more
| important each year).
|
| This is something I discovered pretty late in my life. The
| web pages maintained by profs barely have any info.
|
| I have come to hate the whole "everybody looks for different
| things" type of answer when it comes to PhD apps. I wish
| profs would just spell it out on their site in concrete terms
| what they personally look for.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Would you rather be told you're not going to get a stable job
| as a researcher when you're 21 and first applying to grad
| school or at 28-35 when you're finally told you didn't get
| any interviews for a tenure track job?
| dbcooper wrote:
| Exactly. It's far better to get rejected early from the PhD
| track, for not being a high achiever, than to muddle
| through unable to secure a job. You would still be able to
| prove yourself in a masters degree.
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| Kinda, some people I know who did poorly at
| undergraduate/masters did a lot better at the PhD level
| though and vice versa as research is very different to
| being taught.
|
| There is such a lack of permanent research positions
| compared to postdocs and PhD students that I'm not even
| sure it's selecting for the best people.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Society needs way more than just a few "high achievers"
| ie people willing to work themselves to the death for
| vague rewards, doing science.
| currymj wrote:
| right, this is the clear improvement. on the other hand,
| now it means science-oriented high schoolers lives get an
| extra helping of misery and stress.
|
| on top of this you also filter out anyone who doesn't
| perfectly stay on this high-stakes pipeline from age 14 to
| tenure, which is probably not good overall for science.
|
| economics is actually pretty close to working this way
| already. indeed, the job market for economics PhDs is much
| less dystopian than say life sciences. but there are
| tradeoffs.
| pmichaud wrote:
| A different possibility is that we stop trying to find "the
| best" candidates (which, by the way we're measuring with
| metrics that have been Goodharted well beyond relevance).
| What if this (and maybe everything else) worked via a kind of
| lottery:
|
| 1. The institution in question evaluates candidates as either
| a fit or not a fit. 2. The candidates who fit are the pool
| from which the positions are filled at random.
|
| Obviously it's gameable as stated, but I think if I spent a
| day or two designing a better mechanism with the same
| premise, we'd end up with great candidates but without the
| hyperoptimization trap.
| chriskanan wrote:
| As someone who loves my career as a researcher and scientist,
| but was denied admittance when I applied from 2003 - 2005, I'd
| be opposed to denying the career opportunity to those who want
| careers in research and to follow their dreams.
|
| Academia isn't the only career path for those with a PhD (I
| worked in industry and at NASA as well), and I think students
| should be taught that early on. I think we deny the opportunity
| to learn how to conduct research to too many people due to
| limited resources.
|
| Regarding student aptitude, that's hard to measure. Already we
| highly prioritize students who have already published as
| undergraduates. If we do more to ensure student aptitude, it
| would hurt those who may excel but were held back by a lack of
| mentorship during their undergraduates in how to get into a PhD
| program. This would also negatively impact efforts to increase
| diversity in science as well.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| If anything, with increasing automation we need more PhD
| students and more research being done.
|
| The problem is the gatekeepers such as journal corps profit
| from the artificial scarcity they create. There's no reason for
| them to only publish a certain number of "papers" in the
| paperless world.
| betaby wrote:
| Not sure about 'with increasing automation we need more PhD
| students', sizeable chunk of PhD papers are in categories 'I
| ran ping from the multiple cloud providers' and 'I've
| injected some BGP routes via multiple internet exchanges'.
| wat_do_phd_923 wrote:
| This isn't even remotely surprising.
|
| I'm a current PhD student in a coveted top-3 program. We have one
| of the better stipends in the country, and I've been fully funded
| by fellowships. My advisor thinks highly of me and isn't abusive.
| I have a perfect GPA (not that that matters), some publications,
| and pretty broad technical skills in "hot" area(s). Nevertheless,
| graduation feels hopelessly out of reach, and I'm getting closer
| and closer to dropping out.
|
| Academia is full of cronyism, perverse incentives, idea theft.
| Never mind work-life balance, there is no distinction whatsoever
| between work and life. There's no "out" if you're in a bad
| situation; you can't just change jobs like in the real world;
| your advisor is your "third parent". The incentive structures
| make it nearly impossible to meaningfully collaborate without
| some petty authorship conflict arising. It's isolating and
| seemingly designed to create unhappy, atomized, paranoid,
| jealous, mean-competitive people. At the end, there is ultimately
| no reward, materially speaking: all but the very tippy-top
| academic job tracks are no better.
|
| Academia's clerical heritage is not its only monastic quality.
| I'm on the wrong side of my 20s and still living in a tiny,
| crappy apartment with a roommate. At this point I implicitly
| believe I will never get close to owning a home. That a family is
| out of the question. That the future is always worse than the
| present. I've gradually turned into a learned-helplessness "sorry
| I exist" person, without ever noticing.
|
| Suddenly I see how pathetic that is. I'm ready to change back.
| I'm ready to be optimistic and ambitious and self-confident
| again. I'm ready to live a life of improvement, not stagnation.
| I'm ready to build something meaningful. Not to mention, my eyes
| are finally opening to how much I could be making in industry if
| only I hadn't been so proud/idealistic/willfully ignorant... And
| how much better that kind of salary can make your life.
|
| For the right offer, I am so ready to break free (DMs open (just
| kidding (but actually though))).
| naijaboiler wrote:
| take your masters and run. go into the real world and get a
| job. your paycheck, mental health, future family will all thank
| you
| bioemerl wrote:
| Science as a whole has died a hard death.
|
| All reward and prestige of being a researcher has been lost and
| the people in the study have a slim chance of being able to work
| with their degree.
|
| Which I understand is about the opposite of what this article
| wants, but you shouldn't trust the people who have broken science
| to fix it. Research itself gets locked behind tightly walled
| journals and are written with obscure and difficult language
| laymen can't understand, peer review has become a hoop jumping
| scam that let's bad research through.
|
| Medical review and other ethics boards are suffocating the
| ability for researchers to actually do things in a massive
| overcorrection from the early days of research.
|
| Media is in a continuous game of misrepresentation of everything
| researchers say and trust in scientific truth had lead to
| instructional actors getting their fingers in the process and
| corrupting it to suit their ends.
|
| ARXIV and the likes are the future of science. Where literal
| discord servers are getting together to publish studies. Yeah.
| Bunk gets published all the time, but peer review can just happen
| dynamically through good old regular unchecked skepticism.
|
| I would never in a billion years engage in the academic side of
| research. If I wanted to be a scientist I'd do it as a hobby,
| buying the tools to do it in my garage and publishing to open
| journals where ethics boards and bureaucrats cannot touch me
| beyond the reach of actual law.
|
| In all hopes, academia will start to crumble and this sort of
| garage philosophy will grow into a network of people that
| replaces it with a fresher and more dynamic outlook.
| tptacek wrote:
| I've heard a lot of complaints from a lot of different people
| working in lab science (in my case, my interest was in bio &
| chem) and none of them were about "tightly walled journals"
| (working academic researchers generally have institutional
| access, and when the logins are annoying to manage they just
| sci-hub like everyone else) or IRBs.
|
| Rather, it was very basic stuff, like being told to come in at
| 5:30AM to feed a cell line only to have the PI show up at 2PM,
| throw the experiment in the garbage, threaten the student's
| livelihood, and then demand they stay until 11:30PM redoing the
| experiment. Over and over again, at random intervals.
|
| I asked around about this stuff because a family member now
| works in the field and had some startling experiences, only to
| find that this is apparently almost universal, and that what
| I'm describing is on the lighter end of it. There are stories
| about labs at elite universities where the grad students have
| set up secluded spaces to go hide from their PIs and cry. It's
| everything you've heard about working as a developer at a video
| game company, dialed up to 11.
| bumby wrote:
| A lot of this seems to be poor leadership ability.
| Unfortunately, it seems like in the sciences you can get get
| promoted because you're really good technically, but these
| skills don't mean you can manage a hill of beans. Rather than
| treating the whole system down, maybe we need to look to
| promote those who can manage teams rather than just those who
| are "merely" technically bright.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I had a friend who made a big board with switches and knobs
| on it that changed lights and other stuff. It connected to
| nothing. But sometimes the professor would come to the lab to
| "be helpful". So they would point to the board and say turn
| that switch when I ask. Or rotate that knob or whatever. And
| the professor would get bored and leave after a while. But I
| guess he was good at getting money so that's all that matters
| in some places.
| bioemerl wrote:
| I don't really speak out of concern of the well being of
| those in research, but for the health of the system as a
| whole.
|
| The fact it's a monster that eats people alive to me is an
| evidence that the whole thing needs to be torn down and
| replaced, which is the best way to erase all these sorts of
| harms.
|
| But this isn't about today's scientists. I fully expect a
| collapse of academia to harm anyone currently in it, because
| the skills you need to succeed will change dramatically
| searine wrote:
| >The fact it's a monster that eats people alive to me is an
| evidence that the whole thing needs to be torn down and
| replaced, which is the best way to erase all these sorts of
| harms.
|
| It is easy to tear down but hard to build.
|
| I get that you are jaded, but tearing down institutional
| science is just going to harm future scientists by robbing
| them of opportunity. Yes the system isn't perfect, but that
| doesn't mean we have to throw it in the trash in its
| entirety.
| askin4it wrote:
| What does Opportunity have to do with science?
|
| In this case, it seems like the Opportunity is an
| opportunity to get trapped in a system that is likely to
| be both unsatisfactory and unproductive.
|
| My fear is that we've crossed the event horizon and we
| can't rollback all the alterations that accumulated over
| the years and gotten academics into a cul-de-sac or box
| canyon. (Pick your metaphor...) next stop, the
| singularity, where we will have the opportunity to
| experience life as a dimensionless point...
| searine wrote:
| >What does Opportunity have to do with science?
|
| Most science requires specialized tools and materials
| that cannot be obtained outside of an institutional
| environment. Tearing down the institutions means ceasing
| basically all non-profit generating "big science"
| efforts. That robs future scientists of working on the
| cutting edge.
|
| A garage lab is fun idea, but the reality is infeasible
| in most circumstances. Even if possible, it will be slap-
| shod and a gigantic money pit that no granting agency
| will give a dime to.
|
| >My fear is that we've crossed the event horizon
|
| Hyperbole. Science existed before institutions and will
| exist after if it all should come tumbling down. There
| are more scientists than there has ever been, and as a
| result a lot of "boring" but necessary science is
| happening, but that doesn't mean there aren't rebels and
| outlaws in that same system asking interesting questions
| and overturning ideas.
| askin4it wrote:
| Very interesting points. Thanks for taking the time to
| share.
| [deleted]
| nenrkkfn wrote:
| I had a tenured faculty position at an R1 university and left
| it in part because of a completely dysfunctional institutional
| environment with no insight. My best friends include full
| professors at well-known institutions, though, and I've
| continued to be involved with academics and research.
|
| I'm frankly tired of science being characterized in terms of
| competitiveness and abuse. That's true, but it's deeper than
| that. It is now structurally corrupt, in the sense that nominal
| credit does not reflect actual contributions and results are
| often questionable or even fraudulent, and the incentives are
| structured to reward collecting new data that are very
| predictable rather than new ideas or exploring unknowns.
|
| The characterization of science as just being "stressful" or
| "competitive", as opposed to being broken and corrupt, does
| disservice and deflects from real change by implicitly putting
| the responsibility on those who are affected the most.
|
| It's as if you had a city full of crime, white collar as well
| as otherwise, and then discussed the problems in terms of
| victims being anxious, rather than the fact there's no police
| in the the city and the court system is corrupt.
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| I think I developed a similar conclusion that research as a
| whole is corrupted when there was that CS student that
| committed suicide due being affected by paper-approval
| collusion agreements involving nearly all the prominent
| researchers in the field. Nothing was done about it, even
| though it directly contributed to someone's death.
|
| I had so much disgust for the field since then.
| extasia wrote:
| I wasn't aware of this, do you have a link you could share?
| jasonhong wrote:
| I think it's referring to this case:
| https://huixiangvoice.medium.com/the-hidden-story-behind-
| the...
|
| And for outcomes, the paper in question was retracted and
| the professor involved resigned. However, I haven't seen
| updates regarding the review ring (where a bunch of peer
| reviewers collude).
|
| https://retractionwatch.com/2021/03/16/after-grad-
| student-su...
|
| https://www.wuft.org/news/2021/04/23/university-of-
| florida-p...
| NeuNeurosis wrote:
| This echos so much of the world it seems right now.I have
| seen this in engineering, analytics, and the restaurant
| industry.
|
| New people and outsiders still have so much hope for what the
| paths they choose offer them and once they enter and progress
| are faced with the "city full of crime...(with) no police"
| and very little recourse. Engineers that are berated and
| bullied to output test results that conform to desired
| product specs, management that wants data that conforms to
| "projected" trends and bully analysts to "massage" the data
| accordingly, chefs that are told they have to work 12-16hr
| 5-6 days a week. These are just the examples that I have
| personal experience with.
|
| It seems that this structural corruption has everything to do
| with financial rewards and who holds the purse strings. The
| group/s that dole out the rewards seem to have played their
| hand miraculously and convinced everyone that this is the
| only way.
|
| As I write this it reminds me of threads I was reading 10
| years ago about surgery and surgeons and what it took to
| become apart of that field. It was described as being fraught
| with super high stress, high precision, high physically
| demands such as super long shifts (24-48hrs) lack of sleep,
| and a huge drop out rate. So many of the posters from the
| industry were saying while it was toxic and terrible it
| produced world class surgeons and that culture of training
| and gatekeeping was what kept the profession the best in
| world.
|
| Would you say that possibly the people maintaining the
| "structurally corrupt" culture are doing it to maintain a
| perceived superiority and relevance both financially and
| socially? What about the political winds constantly
| undermining the output of the profession when it becomes
| politically expedient to do so? Do you have any ideas on what
| change would look like? What are some of the solutions that
| you and your friends have discussed?
| autokad wrote:
| I worked in a research lab at a university for 10 years. It was
| grant funded, so my position could get canceled at any time, but
| so is working at at a private company. While the pay was about
| half of what I made a year after leaving and working at private
| companies, working in the research lab was WAAAAAAY easier.
| contemporary343 wrote:
| Speaking as a tenured PI in the (applied) physical sciences,
| everything here is true but a lot of it boils down to a lack of
| perspective and imagination by many faculty running labs.
|
| There are many positive examples out there of ensuring student
| career success in a supportive lab environment while also
| producing good research. These need to be amplified as role
| models.
| Balgair wrote:
| Care to share some of those examples?
| whatever31337 wrote:
| [flagged]
| cush wrote:
| I've seen this toxic culture tear people apart first hand. 80+hr
| weeks, 52 weeks a year, barely enough pay to make rent, while
| being berated by emails at 3am by the PI for poor data. It's
| sickening.
| grt_thr wrote:
| When I was a post grad I could make less than I would at
| McDonalds for work I was volontold to do.
|
| I did the smart thing and quit. When you select for people who
| don't do the smart thing and want to be exploited in exchange for
| prestige they get exploited.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > I did the smart thing and quit. When you select for people
| who don't do the smart thing and want to be exploited in
| exchange for prestige they get exploited.
|
| I've also been told this is a prime driver for gender disparity
| in STEM academia: the women with the talent to succeed in a Ph.
| D. instead go earn their MD.
| marktangotango wrote:
| Whenever these things come up, I'm always grateful toward my
| past self who opted out of academia and pursued industry. The
| entire system of placing your fate in the hands of
| disinterested, self motivated, senior faculty and researchers
| seemed very risky to me at the time. Plus the money has been
| nice. But I do feel like I missed out on some intellectual
| growth. YMMV.
| fullshark wrote:
| In grad school I learned a bunch of stuff and pushed forward
| a research topic that was outdated at the time but I just had
| no idea. Once I got into industry it was obvious and I had to
| catch up. The degree ended up providing nothing more than a
| signal for job interviews.
| generic92034 wrote:
| True. But please consider the difference the social background
| of the people makes. If you are financially secure due to
| parents (or whatever) you can easily accept positions with a
| low payment and do your best to get into a promising tenure
| track.
|
| So maybe it is only partly about exploitation, but also about
| applying a social filter.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| I would describe the best "second-tier" academics I've
| encountered as mostly fitting the "parents money" archetype.
|
| They're not the uber geniuses who flit to the top, but since
| the toxic incentives aren't as important to them due to their
| financial independence they get to focus on the work which
| ultimately pays dividends in their career.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Have been in research 20 years, and cultures vary dramatically by
| group.
|
| Scientists also seem to be more anxiety prone than the general
| population. Also, it doesn't help if you take your work too
| seriously.
| Lutger wrote:
| I'm sorry to say it and you probably mean well, but your
| response sounds like the very kind of victim blaming that
| perpetuates and reinforces the abusive culture the article is
| talking about.
|
| Instead of the victims or the culture, I'd rather look at the
| systemic issues that scientific institutions struggle with:
| debt, lack of social mobility, being underpaid and overworked,
| etc.
| omginternets wrote:
| We can also look at main effects across populations.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I would point out this
|
| https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2022/08/31/22-tenu.
| ..
|
| as one of the elephants in the room. It's particularly a
| problem for DEI because someone who diagnoses their problem
| as "I am a woman", "I am black", ... is missing the major
| factor that the people who seem to fit in just fine in
| academia just fine are _working in the family business._ That
| is, at best you can erase "black stigma" but the privilege
| you are looking for is not a "white privilege" shared by all
| whites but rather a much more specific privilege, and if we
| just got them to where the average white person is they'd
| still feel lost at sea.
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| Low pay and an insecure job. It's like a pyramid scheme and many
| end up either forced to leave science or remain an eternal
| postdoc, and in countries like Germany postdoc funding is
| restricted once you reach a certain career stage so even the
| eternal postdoc isn't an option.
| juujian wrote:
| And graduate students will be the last ones to receive a "pay
| raise" or even cost-of-living adjustment, I am certain.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| My understanding is that there's been a big rise in mental
| illness, anxiety and stress in general, over the last 10 yeats or
| so. And its true across professions, ages, race, gender or
| sexuality.
|
| A lot of factors pushing for it:
|
| 1. the general madness and chaos of the Trump presidency ("When I
| wake up in the morning will I learn Trump has launched nukes at
| North Korea? Or vice versa?" etc etc, ad nauseum for 4 years)
|
| 2. COVID lockdowns and economic swings
|
| 3. apparent explosive rise in gun mass shootings -- "Will I or my
| loved ones be next?"
|
| 4. social media's toxic effect on peace of mind, in general
|
| 5. active efforts by various actors to spread lies, sow tensions
| and trigger violence (eg. stochastic terrorism)
|
| 6. carbon climate crisis... a biggie
|
| Therefore I've been building a sci-fi post-apoc, educational game
| lately [SB: see below] which happens to take as its premises
| that:
|
| 7. humanity (or at least the US) fails to save democracy
|
| 8. humanity fails to act boldly enough or fast enough to save us
| from the worst of climate change's most dystopic effects
|
| 9. and therefore, due to all of above, there's a yet further
| MASSIVE rise in mental health disorders (all the way up to full
| blown de facto "insanity") -- eg. like many of the survivors you
| see in the Mad Max films
|
| From a purely entertainment standpoint I loved watching films
| like Idiocracy and Mad Max Fury Road. As a person in the real
| world and a patriotic citizen I don't want to see us descend to
| that level of insanity, struggle and suffering. Our existing
| mental health systems are already inadequate today. If we start
| losing more doctors, nurses & therapists to anxiety/depression or
| over-work fatigue (speaking in broad terms), and also scientists,
| engineers, teachers, etc, then it will get MUCH worse.
|
| ----
|
| [SB] - https://synystrongames.itch.io/slartboz
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I know a very intelligent woman: graduated in 4 years having a
| 4.0 with a double major in CS and Chemistry. She was extremely
| gung-ho about going to university and achieving her PhD, and I
| naively believed at the time that she'd have no trouble
| accomplishing her goals.
|
| Enter competitive research academia. She felt constantly defeated
| by classmates and advisors who seemed to be working against her
| at every turn. One advisor, whom she trusted, moved to take a job
| with another university. She followed in the hope that she could
| shed the toxicity of the current working environment. Turns out
| that the new place was just as toxic.
|
| She finished with a 4.0 through grad school but never defended
| the dissertation due to burnout, tired of the constant struggle
| for resources, attention, and just plain basic humanity. She now
| has a subservient role to PhDs she could run circles around
| intellectually.
| abhayhegde wrote:
| Academia places unrealistic goals on brilliant people and pays
| them so meagerly that they have to often find other sources of
| income. On top of this, some of the advisors are outright
| unbearable with their demands and work expectations, the world
| seems bleak for even a motivated researcher. Amidst the scarcity
| of grants, measly pay, extremely competitive environment,
| uncertainties tied with job market, failures in experimental
| methods, intractable theoretical adventures, publish-or-perish
| culture, and the better alternatives available for someone with a
| skill-set enough to pursue grad school, it's hardly any surprise
| grad students have mental health issues.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Some advice for grad students who want to preserve their mental
| health:
|
| 1) Have an entirely separate life outside of academia. Do not
| mix the two, maintain a strict separation, and keep all
| academic relationships strictly professional.
|
| 2) Don't think of your advisor as anything other than an
| employer. They're not a father figure or a mentor or anything
| like that. You're just cheap labor, and don't forget it.
|
| 3) Don't think of you university as a 'place of learning and
| research' - they've all been corporatized to the hilt, and are
| basically run on the same lines as any business entity,
| including the worst aspects of corporate HR.
|
| 4) If you do have mental health issues, absolutely never go to
| anyone like a university-affiliated therapist, etc. If you ever
| have a dispute with the university, they'll use any such
| interaction in an effort to discredit you.
|
| 5) Fraudulent manipulation of data is more common than not as
| is dishonest behavior by PIs, and if your data from your own
| research doesn't agree with their past work, they'll try to
| prevent it from getting published and otherwise sabotage your
| progress, so expect that.
|
| 6) Academic politics is among the nastiest that exists, and
| enemies of your PI will also happily sabotage your progress
| just to make your PI look bad. Even other grad students might
| try something like this, so trust noone (and see #1).
|
| 7) If you have any really brilliant ideas with commercial
| potential, don't say a word about it to anyone, don't write it
| down, because the university will claim that it owns all your
| IP and will demand a percentage of anything you do with it, so
| keep quiet until you've left the system.
|
| You can learn a lot if you get into the right situation,
| however. Careful vetting of any prospective research group is
| important in that respect.
| CollinEMac wrote:
| My wife is a researcher and it's astounding to me how many
| people she works with ignore point 1. Almost everyone is
| dating other people in the same lab or at least the same
| institution.
|
| As you can imagine some people do great with it but I'm also
| aware of some catastrophes.
|
| I like to think that our relationship, where we're free to
| vent about our work but also talk about and enjoy lots of
| other things, helps to keep us both mentally healthy.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Yeah, it's not a matter of the "culture" at all. It's just a
| matter of low pay, long hours, and minuscule chances of job
| security and advancement.
|
| (He says as he writes his thesis and prepares to start his
| postdoc.)
| kevviiinn wrote:
| Honestly I would be happy if I just got paid as a 100% FTE.
| I'm literally in the lab all the time, this 50% nonsense is
| BS. They say it's because international students are
| restricted to 20 hours per week, so okay just double the pay
| then and still call it 50%. The salary for my current work is
| super low anyhow, I'd be making way more if I got a job at
| big pharma with my current degrees
| explorer83 wrote:
| I toggle around with the idea that the system is designed
| or heavily influenced to be like this to benefit the big-
| industries and rich people. Have talent but need money?
| Work for big industry. Have money and can afford to stay in
| school? Get some patents and get more rich. I know this is
| a bit tin foil hat-ish.
| geysersam wrote:
| Funny that this is published in Nature. Arguably they're part
| of the corruption (not in the legal sense) prevalent in the
| "industry".
|
| Self-awareness is good but less impressive when they're still
| charging universities obscene amounts to access material the
| journal obtained basically for free.
| qazpot wrote:
| I think the part about "unrealistic goals" is applicable to a
| lot of spheres of life and exacerbated by the social media.
| Social media after all inflicts high expectations and pressure
| to convert your life into a performance on everyone
| irrespective of profession, culture, age, country.
|
| And ofcourse the Titans of social media - zuckerberg, chamath,
| tiktok and 1000s of engineers, PMs will not pay for the harm
| their engineered products have caused because waters have been
| muddied enough and no true accounting of the harm can happen.
|
| It is kind of like inventing a new synthetic highly addictive
| drug which is technically legal but very harmful and you can
| sell it to everyone.
| vkou wrote:
| Blaming social media for this is shooting the messenger.
|
| You don't need Facebook or the Gram to be keenly aware that
| all your university buddies who went into tech are going on
| vacations to Maui and buying their second homes, while you're
| still grinding your life away for nothing in a university
| lab. In fact, all you need to do be aware of this is to show
| up to your friends' bi-weekly happy hour at the local.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I'm curious how that isn't obvious to someone going into
| research.
| vkou wrote:
| It is quite obvious, which is why the parent poster's ire
| is misplaced.
| obscurette wrote:
| > Blaming social media for this is shooting the messenger.
|
| No, it's not. Social media created a world wide bullying
| environment. Most of people all over the world are in
| trouble because they have to compete with unrealistic image
| of you or your profession created by social media. Whatever
| you are or do, you are never good enough. Education,
| medical field and science are especially vulnerable in this
| regard.
|
| Tech sector isn't really exception, but insane amount of
| money people get in some parts of the world for
| compensation makes it more tolerable.
| greenhearth wrote:
| Can the institutions be blamed for trying to stay afloat? Where
| is this money coming from to pay the scientists? A collective
| decision has to be made to keep science healthy in a meaningful
| and productive way. I think academia (through its ethos of
| critical approach and peer review) may be the single social
| structure that keeps some kind of sanity.
| kevviiinn wrote:
| I don't know, can the admins stay afloat without making 200k+
| per year? Maybe give some of that to us grad students
| mrguyorama wrote:
| No you see those admins are important because they went to
| business school so they deserve to make more money than the
| peons they oversee
| tptacek wrote:
| Academic research is funded by grants.
| greenhearth wrote:
| Can these grants provide a living wage?
| ordersofmag wrote:
| Wages paid by grants in general have to match whatever
| the institutions 'standard' pay scales are. So it's the
| institutions deciding pay rates. At least in the U.S..
| CrazyStat wrote:
| My wife is currently in the middle of a fight over this.
| Her salary is paid by a grant from an organization that
| has a minimum pay scale for postdocs. The university has
| its own standard pay scale for postdocs, which is about
| $20k/year lower. So far they've refused to budge. It's
| not even their money, there's just 4 layers of
| bureaucracy who have nothing better to do than ~enforce
| policy~ no matter the cost.
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| Of course they'd fight your wife. They don't want any
| history or evidence of potentially paying more under any
| circumstances.
| nradov wrote:
| Perhaps so, if universities cut back on overhead. Much of
| the grant funding is taken away to pay administrators who
| don't directly contribute to research. There is a huge
| amount of waste and no real pressure to control costs.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Well, if we got rid of the administrators taking half the
| grants, we could probably almost double the wages. So in
| many cases, yes.
| chriskanan wrote:
| Depends on where you live: https://csstipendrankings.org/
|
| NSF grants are hard to get, with a small award being for
| about $600K over 3 years. That translates to about $300K
| after the university takes its overhead. For me, that
| would about fund about two PhD students for 3 years for
| about $31K per year during the 9 month academic year.
| Many PhD students in computer science do internships
| during summer where they make a lot larger salaries, or
| they are funded by me for that period instead.
|
| In my city, Rochester, according to this website, our
| stipends are the most generous in the USA based on the
| low cost of living here. https://csstipendrankings.org/
|
| We would all like to pay students more, but either we
| then have fewer students or need the government to award
| larger grants. As someone who had a hard time getting
| into a PhD program due to how competitive it is, I would
| be opposed to depriving folks of educational
| opportunities.
|
| Students typically take classes and do little research
| for their first 1-2 years, but they do receive a stipend
| during that time period.
| fatnoah wrote:
| > Academia places unrealistic goals on brilliant people and
| pays them so meagerly that they have to often find other
| sources of income
|
| Early in my career, I considered (with an MS in Electrical
| Engineering, but with 4 years of professional programming
| experience) a switch into law. Big firms hire (or did in the
| past) people with tech degrees to do patent work and will pay a
| salary plus pay for law school.
|
| When I joined the big firm, there were about 25 people in my
| role. I was the only with with an EE or CS degree/background,
| the only one without a PhD, and the only one with actual post-
| academic work experience. For me, it was a 10% pay cut before
| accounting for law school tuition, similar benefits, and an
| small increase in hours. For all of the PhDs, it was
| essentially a 100% raise, substantially less work, and superior
| benefits.
| jebarker wrote:
| > Big firms hire (or did in the past) people with tech
| degrees to do patent work and will pay a salary plus pay for
| law school.
|
| I've never heard this before. What job title would you search
| for?
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I'm not the parent poster, but I believe they are generally
| called patent agents
| [deleted]
| spamizbad wrote:
| Part of what contributes to this is the "brainwashing" that
| takes place in PhD programs that discourages applicants from
| transitioning out of academia into "the industry". Academia has
| tons of extremely smart, hard-working individuals, most of whom
| would have excellent white collar careers with half the work
| and 2-10x the pay.
|
| There are a handful of academics who are truly built for
| working in academia and wouldn't be as successful in "the
| industry" but at least half could transition out of academia
| and clean-up with a normal office job.
| f6v wrote:
| You should be discouraged from abandoning projects when
| hitting a wall. I'd advise against dropping out of PhD
| program if you don't have a publication ready in second year.
| Also, there're people who truly enjoy science and pay isn't
| the deciding factor.
| vkou wrote:
| > Also, there're people who truly enjoy science and pay
| isn't the deciding factor.
|
| If that's a good reason to keep pay low, why don't we apply
| this to the management and administrative class? Surely, we
| could find someone smart and capable who'd be happy to do
| an exec's or a director's job, without seven-figure pay as
| a consideration...
|
| Think of all the money we could return to shareholders, if
| we just made the directors subsist on prayers and ramen...
| bumby wrote:
| > _Surely, we could find someone smart and capable who 'd
| be happy to do an exec's or a director's job, without
| seven-figure pay as a consideration..._
|
| We do, depending on domain. Directors in a lot of social
| programs make low pay for what they deal with. Luckily,
| many are mission oriented rather than being motivated
| primarily by money.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I really don't understand this mentality either. I left
| academia to work in a company where my job is still doing
| research and writing papers but I get paid more money. I even
| write grants! And I get treated way better by the system in
| place, I have private health insurance, I get a performance
| bonus, I even get a company paid ski week!
|
| There's a regular story told in physics departments that if
| you leave you can't get back in. But in my experience, maybe
| people leave and don't want to go back.
| ke88y wrote:
| _> There 's a regular story told in physics departments
| that if you leave you can't get back in._
|
| At least in CS, becoming a Professor of Practice is both
| higher prestige and a much lower barrier to entry than
| becoming an Associate Professor with Tenure. The job
| security of the Professor of Practice is de jure weaker but
| de facto much stronger. (Tenure doesn't mean shit these
| days, especially in the USA.)
|
| _> But in my experience, maybe people leave and don 't
| want to go back._
|
| Bingo. And it becomes way more extreme by the year.
|
| After a couple decades in the tech industry with a modest
| lifestyle, 4.3% on your entirely post-tax brokerage account
| comes damn close to paying a full professor's salary.
| Retirement at 45 ain't a bad gig.
|
| Get bored? No problem. Move somewhere nice close to a good-
| but-not-top-10-R1 university.
|
| Teaching can be fun. You can always ad junct if and only
| you get the bug. Most departments are extremely happy
| because the customers LOVE being taught by people who did
| the real thing.
|
| Research is similar: if you find a student you really enjoy
| working with or an idea you really want to pursue, you can
| opt to write a grant or take an industry gig for a bit.
| Student's choice -- chill poverty or same work but with
| weekly standups and more meetings and 5x comp. Again, the
| customers LOVE being able to tell Congress they are funding
| real stuff.
|
| And you don't have to sit in faculty meetings where a bunch
| of people pretend that their grant agencies and students
| aren't customers, or that their department chair and dean
| aren't their line manager and skip line manager, or that
| their PhD students aren't criminally underpaid direct
| reports.
|
| Overall, it's nice to be able to clip coupons on bonds and
| have uni admin fawning over you. It beats the alternative
| of the tenure track, where you have to continue wage
| slaving at a university whose admin has been totally
| MBAified and can't really offer your direct reports much in
| the way of solidarity because there are 100 28 year olds
| who can also be PIs on military-industrial projects
| interspersed with the occasional NSF/NIH grant.
| kevviiinn wrote:
| In my PhD program I don't see that at all, in fact our
| program recently paid for students to attend a multiple day
| seminar about how to get jobs _outside_ academia. I 'm not
| sure where you get that impression from
| vinnie-io wrote:
| have you considered you might already be brainwashed
| ke88y wrote:
| _> in fact our program recently paid for students to attend
| a multiple day seminar about how to get jobs outside
| academia._
|
| Consider that preparing you for jobs outside of university
| should be the _goal of your education_ , not relegated to a
| two-day seminar.
|
| And also consider how relatively fucked it is that such a
| seminar is actually quite necessary due to the fact that
| the vast majority of your faculty haven't spent more than a
| trivial amount of time in industry. (Things that don't
| count as non-trivial industry experience include: the gap
| year between undergrad and grad school, the one year
| industry Post-Doc, sporatic consulting, the "spinoff" that
| never got past a seed round in which the university
| endowment or SBIR was the lead "investor", or especially
| the "several internships at top companies" lol.)
| xupybd wrote:
| I've noticed that the smarter and more academic people in my life
| are more prone to anxiety and depression. I've often wondered if
| there is a cause behind that correlation or just a random
| coincidence amongst the people I know. I guess this could account
| for some of that.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Scientists are exploited the same way game developers are
| exploited: their love for the area, and the intangible rewards
| they get from working in it, are used to depress wages and
| benefits.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| It seems like this is a symptom of a larger problem, rates of
| anxiety and depression have been going up in recent years in
| pretty much every facet. I always hear that social media is to
| blame, but I wonder if that is really the case? I feel like
| something else is going on, maybe it's just a totality of smaller
| issues rather than one big problem.
| DrThunder wrote:
| It's being coddled in a sense. You have an entire generation
| that had very little required of them. Many of them never heard
| the word no and were just given what they wanted. Additionally,
| k12 schools told them that any slight or disagreement put
| towards them was bullying and unacceptable. No one should have
| to hear opinions they don't agree with.
|
| Imagine growing up that way and then being sent off on your
| own. Of course your mental well-being will plummet. It's like
| being in a nice climate controlled house for 18 years and then
| being thrown out in the wilderness. When your expectation is to
| never have to deal with any discomfort.... well it's a shock.
|
| As far as the social media part, I think many of these kids
| were raised on smart devices. They were receiving constant
| dopamine hits from a young age and no parenting on emotional
| regulation. If your brain is wired for an easy dopamine hit
| that doesn't require work, the real world is pretty harsh and
| depressing.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Related, but not completely this topic, and a sample size of
| two warning!
|
| I have a couple of boys, 5 and 8. They have tablets and
| computers, and they love them. Some days we don't use them,
| some days they spend far too much time on them. Life goes on,
| we do what we can. I played an entire metric crap ton of
| video games at those ages, and I turned out okay, I think.
|
| I keep hearing "screen time." That is the enemy. I'm not so
| sure it's just the screens. Of course it's not playing
| outside in a field, but you can't let them wander too far,
| somebody will call the cops.
|
| A lot of the modern stuff (TV shows, movies, games) seems to
| overstimulate them way quicker compared to something like
| playing a day's worth of Super Mario World. Like it was
| designed to lure them in and enrage them or something.
|
| I'm imagining social media is the same, but we're not there
| yet. I don't do a lot of social media myself, so hopefully
| they will see the example.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Social media does sound like a decent theory though. To your
| point, the issues plaguing the US ( and indeed the world ) have
| not changed that much over the past four decades. What did
| change is relative access to information, which exacerbated and
| maybe even hastened some trends. The small factors were always
| there, but were not as commonly seen for a variety of reasons (
| social stigma, exposure to media, 'toughen up' message from
| society being but a few examples off the top of my ehad ). And
| even now, we only are aware of it as a potential trend due to
| social media exposure ( in this case, HN ). Would we be as
| aware of it even 10 years ago?
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| > To your point, the issues plaguing the US ( and indeed the
| world ) have not changed that much over the past four
| decades.
|
| Inside the US, this sounds wrong both anecdotally and from
| the data. I'd argue the cost of "living" has gone up quite
| substantially. Since 1980 rent has risen 140% and incomes
| 20%[0].
|
| Anecdotally, in the 1970s it was entirely possible to live in
| an acceptable city or suburb on part-time work, and you could
| have your own apartment on minimum wage. You might not have
| _nice things_ but I know many people who spent their 20s very
| comfortably like this not worrying about how to afford
| living. (having a family on this budget was not feasible, but
| that 's another thing)
|
| Conversely today I don't know _anyone_ making less than less
| than 40k /yr who is not constantly stressing about food costs
| and how they'll make rent.
|
| [0] https://www.realestatewitch.com/rent-to-income-
| ratio-2022/
| cornercasechase wrote:
| > _To your point, the issues plaguing the US ( and indeed the
| world ) have not changed that much over the past four
| decades._
|
| Wealth inequality has an increased a lot in the last four
| decades. I'd start there when looking for a source for mental
| health issues.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/social-
| trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Money does buy certain level of comfort ( and help if
| needed ) so I am more than willing to consider it as a
| factor, but I am not sure it is THE answer to the source of
| mental health issues. Lack thereof may make things worse,
| but I am not sure it is the core issue. FWIW, I may well be
| wrong, but I don't think it is fair to assume it is X, when
| you see same health issues pop up in otherwise wealthy
| environments. Most interesting example of that being
| 'affluenza'.
| huijzer wrote:
| According to Tim Urban's latest book "What's our problem?",
| modern Western society also has other problems such as an
| increase in groupthink, which is for example visible in the
| aggressiveness of current US politics.
|
| Overall, it's difficult to have much hope for the future. We're
| in a new cold war where collaboration decreases rapidly between
| the West and, I guess, East. That's wildly different than 2008
| when China and Russia appeared to warm up to the West and
| taking some more democratic stances.
|
| What does excite me is the continued improvements in hardware
| and software. Let's hope those things will continue
| improvements in entertainment, medicine, travel, and education.
| abhayhegde wrote:
| I definitely think social media has a large share in driving
| down the mental health of the majority of users. No two lives
| are comparable, yet it induces people to compare their lives to
| someone else's often resulting in an unreasonable amount of
| envy, jealousy, and a general dissatisfaction of their lives.
| People pick their best moments while sharing, but it's never
| the true picture. It sets unrealistic expectations.
| salawat wrote:
| So what are you blaming exactly?
|
| The fact that social media has us all connected and capable
| of measuring relative to others?
|
| Or the fact it's weaponized by an entire industry of
| "influencers" subsidized by actors just trying to maximize
| the consumption factor of economic activity?
|
| Or the fact that the system is fundamentally governed by
| network effect induced power laws, leading to massive
| inequality, that can end up being a stressor on average?
|
| Just trying to tease out the right thread here, is all.
|
| Something that lets us all communicate isn't inherently bad.
| It's the end that it is applied to that is.
| nrb wrote:
| > Something that lets us all communicate isn't inherently
| bad.
|
| I'm not so sure this is the case. Seems like we are testing
| the limits of our social programming when exposed to
| networks _vastly_ beyond our capabilities historically, and
| we're seeing the various ways that our social behaviors
| break down naturally. That there is a profit motive in
| encouraging and accelerating this breakdown might be
| orthogonal to the idea that it isn't meant to exist at this
| scale in the first place.
| bendango wrote:
| It's not social media, it's social awareness of the
| exploitation of youth to prop up elders who contribute nothing
| but marching orders that, conveniently, prop up elder
| investments.
|
| It's being mocked over the environment. All they get is tough
| love as a generation dies off leaving behind the worst
| ecological mess any dying generation has left behind.
|
| It's being swindled by one socialized loss to enable private
| gain after another; sports stadiums, healthcare... etc
|
| It's teen women watching bodily autonomy taken from them by a
| bunch of leches.
|
| And, the worst part, it's the apathetic public following
| orders. Feckless society afflicted by learned helplessness; all
| the white collar workers who can't provide anything real for
| themselves. Imagine being on the hook to coddle that?
|
| This culture is a joke of self absorbed primates who ramble in
| high minded praise of their intelligence. War is peace and
| exploitation by aristocrats is freedom.
| nvahalik wrote:
| [flagged]
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Starting with the boomers, children have been raised to think
| they are the most important people in the household.
|
| No wonder, 3 generations later, grown children are a bit
| self-focused.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| In a recent Ezra Klein show interview [1] with social scientist
| Jean Twenge on the documented rise in teenage depression,
| Twenge found it correlated with a rise in social media use, but
| also found that increasing social media use was correlated with
| _fewer hours of in-person social interaction_ among teens than
| previous.
|
| While Twenge wanted to talk about both things (and I'm somewhat
| suspicious of the certainty of her conclusions), I found it
| pretty thought-provoking to focus on the drop in in-person
| social interaction as the driver. Social media use can quite
| likely _lead_ to lower in-person socialization (I do think it
| 's likely causation, and in that direction). And there may be
| other social factors doing such too. Covid obviously. (note
| that rise in teen depression trend started well before covid
| though). Over-protectiveness (for teens) or general fear of
| risk of "the world"/focus on risk reduction. (They talked about
| this a bit).
|
| To me it seems pretty clear (just my intuition/perception, not
| from actual social science) that our society is having a crisis
| of lack of meaningful relationships/community and lack of
| feeling of purpose in one's life, and this is leading to
| depression and anxiety. (As well as possible political
| disaster). What exactly is causing that lack of meaninful
| relationships and purpose, and what can be done, is harder. I
| think the internet is a (large) part of it, but so are other
| parts of the social/political/economic system.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/opinion/ezra-klein-
| podcas...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It's everything. Work from home. Self-check-out at the
| grocery store. Delivery of everything. Telemedicine. Cars
| instead of walkable neighborhoods or mass transit (or even
| bicycles). The decline of church attendance. I can't think of
| one social trend pushing us toward _more_ face-to-face
| interactions.
|
| If it's spanning this many different trends, I think there
| ought to be some larger thing driving it, but I can't put my
| finger on what it is.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Agreed with all of your examples.
|
| I mean, to me, the larger thing is probably "capitalism",
| in which increasing amounts of social life are turned into
| things that can produce profit for a business. Our
| particular capitalism built on racism doesn't help either,
| with it's legacy of "we don't want public amenities because
| we don't want to fund them for THOSE people" and "we're
| scared to go outside because a lot of people have a lot of
| reason to wish us harm." (that we built for cars instead of
| walkable cities or public transit actually has a LOT to do
| with racism)
|
| But people don't love talking about this here. Or rather,
| they do and they don't. :)
|
| In the general socciety, decline of social interaction has
| probably been a topic of discussion since Robert Putman's
| 2000 book "Bowling Alone". http://bowlingalone.com/
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I've worked with groups of juniors and college students every
| year for a while now. I agree that something is going on, but I
| don't think there is a single explanation.
|
| Social media is a big part of it, but from what I've seen it's
| not in the way people usually describe it. The most unhappy
| people I see aren't the ones talking to their friends on
| Instagram and Facebook during their lunch break. To be honest,
| those people seem to be thriving socially simply by virtue of
| keeping up with their friends and coordinating social
| activities.
|
| The most unhappy people I see are the ones consuming hours of
| Reddit and Twitter every day. They have a never ending stream
| of ragebait, outrage headlines, tragedy stories, and world-is-
| ending stories filling their feeds. They're also filled with
| unreasonable expectations about the workplace.
|
| In recent years multiple juniors have confidently told me that
| "nobody can do more than about 2 hours of work per day", citing
| Reddit or Twitter threads that explain it. Then they get into a
| real job that requires a full day of work and feel like they're
| being taken advantage of. I've had a concerning number of
| conversations with juniors who are getting paid $120K or more
| to do entry level work with great mentoring at a local company,
| only to be outraged at some idea that the industry is taking
| advantage of them because they haven't been promoted to senior
| with $300K total comp after their first year. The source of
| these expectations is always some form of social media (Reddit,
| Blind, Twitter)
|
| I don't know how this translates to academic contexts because
| that's not my mentoring domain. I imagine it's at least
| contributing, though. That said, academic environments are
| known to be grueling so it's not entirely a singular issue.
| They really are grueling.
| cornercasechase wrote:
| I think being angry is a natural and healthy response to the
| current economic reality. The juniors you're working with
| have it right. If the CEO is going to make 100X as much as
| me, I'm going to do my best to work 100X less than they do.
| Hopefully we've reached a timeline where we no longer
| acquiesce to rampant inequality.
| badpun wrote:
| If the CEOs have it so great, why not become a CEO yourself
| and reap all those benefits?
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Personally, my knife fighting skills aren't anywhere near
| up to par for that.
| refurb wrote:
| _If the CEO is going to make 100X as much as me, I'm going
| to do my best to work 100X less than they do._
|
| You realized CEO's make that much money after a long career
| where they were busting their asses as juniors.
|
| You basically made the same argument the grandparent is
| criticizing.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Ya, but there are many more people who spend years
| busting their asses in menial jobs who are never rewarded
| for it.
|
| I have no problem with CEOs making lots of money. I have
| a problem with them making 100x more than their median
| employee; especially when their poorest employees aren't
| making a living wage.
| cornercasechase wrote:
| I realize that the CEO was born into a family where they
| were handed their position. You don't get to the top by
| "working hard" that's a sucker's game. You need to be
| born to the right family, grease the right palms and be
| in the right place at the right time. Being a complete
| sociopath doesn't hurt either.
| badpun wrote:
| - CEO of Microsoft is a child of middle class Indian
| immigrants
|
| - so is CEO of Google
|
| - CEO of Apple comes from working/lower-middle class
| family
|
| - CEO of Johnson and Johnson (12th largest SP500 company)
| is an immigrant from Spain, coming from middle class
| family
|
| etc etc etc
| cornercasechase wrote:
| > _CEO of Microsoft is a child of middle class Indian
| immigrants_
|
| Middle class people aren't the secretary to the prime
| minister.
|
| https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/satya-nadela-
| microsoft...
|
| > _so is CEO of Google_
|
| "His father also had a manufacturing plant that produced
| electrical components"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai
|
| You're buying the propaganda.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Middle class people aren't the secretary to the prime
| minister.
|
| That sounds quite normal, actually.
|
| But the middle class (the _petit bourgeoisie_ ) is a
| small, economically elite class. It is in the middle
| between the working class that makes up the vast majority
| and the even narrower _haut borgeoisie_ -- the major
| capitalists whose relation to the economy centers on
| control of capital to which rented labor is applied.
|
| Unfortunately, people sometimes confuse the middle class
| with the middle income segment of the working class,
| which is a very different thing. (And that confusion is
| often deliberately exploited.)
| ke88y wrote:
| _> > Middle class people aren't the secretary to the
| prime minister._
|
| _> That sounds quite normal, actually._
|
| ?!?!
|
| _> Unfortunately, people sometimes confuse the middle
| class with the middle income segment of the working
| class, which is a very different thing. (And that
| confusion is often deliberately exploited.)_
|
| Oh, I see. This doesn't seem particularly helpful. People
| don't "sometimes" confuse those two things. The de facto
| agreed upon meaning of "middle class" has been "middle
| income segment of the working class" for at least a
| century at this point.
|
| And, in any case, serving on the Planning Commission
| seems much closer to "Ruling Class" than "Middle Class"
| unless you literally believe in the illuminati.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > To be honest, those people seem to be thriving socially
| simply by virtue of keeping up with their friends and
| coordinating social activities.
|
| > The most unhappy people I see are the ones consuming hours
| of Reddit and Twitter every day.
|
| I think you make a good distinction here. We always seems to
| lump "social media" into one big blob when talking about it
| but like you said I think there is some nuance here. I see
| Reddit/Twitter as a different kind of social media than
| Facebook/Instagram. On Instagram/FB it's all about the "real
| you", I have an account with my name on it and photos of me.
| Reddit (and to a lesser degree Twitter) on the other hand is
| all about being anonymous and interacting with strangers (as
| opposed to your friends) on the internet.
|
| There's a time and place for both types of interactions but I
| feel like the "anonymous stranger internet" is what's really
| driving most of the negatives we see in social media.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I don't know - I have two kids, one 17 and one 19. The
| 19-year-old graduated valedictorian from his high school of
| 700 last year, did extracurriculars and scored in the 99th
| percentile on the SAT... and was still rejected by the "top"
| colleges he applied to (Stanford, MIT). The 17-year-old got a
| B this year, and she's devastated - if getting everything
| nearly perfect isn't enough, what hope does everybody else
| have? It wasn't like this when I was a teenager in the 80's.
| DrThunder wrote:
| What do you mean, what hope does she have? You do not need
| to go to Stanford or MIT to be successful. In fact I think
| the average person would be better off not going to an
| expensive school like that.
|
| If you're goal is to be in the top echelons of elitist
| society I guess that's where you've got to be. If your aim
| is be gainfully employed and make a good living then those
| schools aren't necessary for anything.
| ke88y wrote:
| _> The 19-year-old graduated valedictorian from his high
| school of 700 last year, did extracurriculars and scored in
| the 99th percentile on the SAT_
|
| _> Stanford, MIT_
|
| I see this attitude often and... I just don't get it. It
| seems innumerate at best.
|
| MIT accepts around 500 students and Stanford accepts around
| 2,000 students. There's overlap between those two groups,
| but let's assume they are entirely disjoint. That gives us
| 2,500 seats. Let's round up to 3,000 just for fun.
|
| Last year, around 3 million students graduated from 20,469
| high schools. That's 20,469 valedictorians for 3,000 spots.
|
| Last year, 1.7 million students took the SAT. That's 17,000
| in the top percentile for 3,000 spots.
|
| The set of valedictorians and set of SAT 99th percentile
| students probably mostly overlap. (And to the extent that
| they don't overlap, it's often because valedictorian is a
| weird game; eg, at both the high school I attended and the
| high school in my current community it's basically
| mathematically impossible to win the valedictorian game if
| you participate in band/orchestra because they aren't
| honors courses for the first 3 semesters... but, of course,
| any sane admissions department knows this and will weigh
| significant involvement in music over two additional honors
| courses.)
|
| So there are at least 10K students who meet at least your
| son's (high) bar, all competing for less than 3,000 seats
| at MIT/Stanford. And that's a conservative estimate. You
| can add in another 5-10 top schools and the arithmetic is
| still either impossible for extremely challenging, even if
| you limit yourself to grades and test scores. And that's
| with extremely generous assumptions.
|
| But, of course, they competition is far stiffer because a
| lot of those seats will go to kids who didn't get 4.0s and
| weren't valedictorians and didn't get 99th percentile SAT
| scores. But that's because they were spending too much time
| doing far more impressive things than running up their
| scores in those categories. Eg doing well at a national
| science fair, doing well at a national debate or mock trial
| tournament, winning a major mathematics competition,
| winning a major writing or art award, doing well nationally
| in a competitive sport, performing a musical instrument at
| a very high level, etc.
|
| And those are just the color-inside-the-lines youth
| competition things. A step up from the "grades and tests"
| nonsense but still very sand boxy. High school students do
| a lot of impressive real world stuff as well -- significant
| open source contributions, significant community
| development work, publishing peer reviewed scientific
| articles, etc. Read George Hotz's wiki page -- kids with
| those sorts of accomplishments apply to places like MIT and
| Stanford every year. Perfect grades and test scores were
| criteria that didn't matter much until a candidate was
| already second or third tier; the difference between 3.8 or
| even 3.5 and 4.0 just doesn't matter when a seventeen year
| old already has career accomplishments on their resume that
| I'd be proud to have at 30. That's just computing. There
| are wunderkids like that in every field. Lots of them.
|
| And even after all of that we still haven't left the
| borders of the USA (at MIT, about 10% of undergraduates are
| international).
|
| _> It wasn 't like this when I was a teenager in the
| 80's._
|
| Fewer students went to college. More importantly, systemic
| barriers to entry -- both informational and cultural --
| remained extremely high for most people without WASPy
| coastal and/or upper-middle-class-suburb backgrounds. The
| internet eroded a lot of those informational and cultural
| barriers. Democratizing access to knowledge dramatically
| increased the efficiency of this market, and that has
| resulted in much stiffer competition.
|
| _> if getting everything nearly perfect isn 't enough,
| what hope does everybody else have?_
|
| I really hope that my kids aren't going to aim for elite
| universities. Having spent a lot of time at both of the
| institutions you mentioned, I know they can get a great
| education and almost certainly live a better life without
| that kind of pressure.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > I know they can get a great education
|
| Too bad the people doing the hiring don't know that.
| ke88y wrote:
| The unemployement rate is around 3%-4%, and at least 99%
| of people don't have degrees from elite universities.
| currymj wrote:
| fyi at least in STEM type fields, the top students at one
| of the good state schools have pretty similar
| opportunities to Stanford MIT etc. you can go work for
| big tech, top HFT and finance firms, go to top grad
| schools, or whatever. unlike at Stanford/MIT/Ivy, it's
| not the default path, so it takes a little bit more
| scheming while you're there to make sure you stand out,
| but it's still quite common every year.
| DrThunder wrote:
| Huh? You believe people that don't go to Ive League
| schools are just living in squalor? I don't know of any
| jobs that require a degree from those schools. MIT is
| even more silly because most tech sector jobs don't care
| where your degree is from.
|
| I'm sure there's some weird pompous elitist corporation
| out there that only pulls from those schools but no one
| NEEDS to work at those places.
|
| If you're basing your success off of gaining entry into
| those schools I have to guess you grew up in a very
| closed off, extremely wealthy area.
| ke88y wrote:
| _> If you 're basing your success off of gaining entry
| into those schools I have to guess you grew up in a very
| closed off, extremely wealthy area._
|
| Either that or a middle income/upper middle income
| immigrant community. Often the intersection of the two.
|
| But, yeah. Having worked at several and in the orbit of
| basically of them: I'm an extreme skeptic of
| undergraduate prestige factories.
|
| Go to a school with decent resources. That's a MUCH
| better way to think about it than "decent school", which
| could mean anything. Want does that mean? Depends on your
| major.
|
| Once there, be curious. Be voracious. Advocate for
| yourself. Major it whatever you want. But also make sure
| at least one of your majors has a lower-risk career track
| to fall back on. Never, ever accept "prestige" in lieu of
| either opportunities to grow or earn cold hard $$$.
| Always remember you live in a _capital_ -ist society.
| People and institutions say they value a lot of things --
| knowledge, God, country. But in a Capital-ism, power and
| comfort flow from people who have access to capital to
| whomever those people please.
| shusaku wrote:
| > The most unhappy people I see are the ones consuming hours
| of Reddit and Twitter every day
|
| Or god forbid Hacker News!
| mordae wrote:
| Perhaps capitalism?
|
| The days of providing new products to the eager market are
| gone. It simply no longer pays to hire more people and let them
| solve other people's problems. It's an all-out class war
| (fighting against unions, bribing politicians, colluding to
| suppress wage growth and so on) with capitalists infighting
| about who gets how large share of the emerging rent economy
| (communications, housing, transportation, food).
| fnord77 wrote:
| There's toxic culture in a lot of fields and there's one common
| denominator.
|
| Can't wait for AI to take over every field it can and push out
| the corrupting factor - humans
| imranq wrote:
| Maybe this is the answer...when humans are no longer required
| for a field to move forward, prestige becomes meaningless and
| everything becomes a means toward self-fulfillment not
| competition
| xbar wrote:
| Science is hard, viciously competitive, and deeply cruel in all
| ways in order for some to win. Cheating, plagiarism, racism,
| sexual harassment, theft of ideas, publishing spam, ....
| Everything is in play in this game.
|
| Calling it "culture" and laying some "blame" is a convenient
| "we're the worst off subset of victims; it's not us, it's them"
| perspective but it will neither solve the problem nor address the
| actual condition--science is not a utopian island that is
| separate from big business economics, university branding and
| wealth, nor from geopolitics.
|
| Scientists have not figured out how to organize as well as any of
| those entities and will continue to be subjugated to their game
| and their system. When that is solved, the tools that abusers
| within the scientific community use against each other are more
| easily addressed.
|
| Perhaps in the meantime we can pass some more laws that that make
| it seem like we care, but the existing regulations that make
| racism/ageism/sexism/abuse illegal are not currently effective.
| But to be clear: we don't care. We fought as hard as we could to
| win at that game and we raise our kids to try to win at that
| game. MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Cal, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin,
| <insert your personal alma mater for which you have pride in its
| research capabilities>: you wanted to get in; maybe you did; you
| will desire for your kids to get in; they probably won't. The
| patents and rights of science and research are in the hands of
| someone who is not doing the work.
| pelasaco wrote:
| yay more laws!
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Fundamentally, the research industry requires continuous
| exponential growth to accommodate everyone working there. Each PI
| trains 10+ grad students in their career. Where do those students
| go? They all want to become PIs themselves. Otherwise why would
| they get a PhD? Ultimately the majority must be disappointed and
| leave for positions outside academia.
|
| But leaving academia is a process that takes some time. First
| cognitively as you give up on your dreams and decide to leave.
| Then as you search for a new job with no real-world experience
| and few or no connections.
|
| In the mean time, the pipeline between grad school and
| professorship gets longer and fuller. Postdocs were once
| extremely prestigious positions, a sort of "finishing school" for
| the elite. Now they're standard, and most people need to do more
| than 1. In practice it's a holding pattern, giving PhDs something
| to do while they try to struggle to the top of the heap and find
| an assistant professorship.
|
| And the actual experience of a postdoc! Leave all your friends
| and move to a new city. Work 60 hours a week for $45k a year.
| Have the rest of your career controlled by your PI, who you maybe
| met a few times before you decided to work for them, who has
| never had any kind of management training, and is under their own
| severe pressure to publish and bring in new grants. Compete
| against other brilliant, driven people, many of whom are abusing
| stimulants, and/or are immigrants with no safety net and willing
| to work 80+ hours.
|
| How could this system NOT create a mental health crisis?
| tptacek wrote:
| In biochem, the norm is for people who intend to work seriously
| in the industry to go to grad school; that is, academic
| research in that field is not a competition for a tiny number
| of academic jobs. But bio and chem have two of the worst
| reputations for academic research culture.
| dv_dt wrote:
| I wonder if there is a filtering effect here where people who
| have relatively better soft skills and technical knowledge
| move into industry, and what we are seeing in academic
| circles is biased to what the industry declined.
| ke88y wrote:
| _> better soft skills_
|
| This is starting to happen in CS -- the level of technical
| competence remains fairly high, but the faculty ranks are
| swelling with "doesn't play well with others" types. Most
| of our PhD interns with serious ego/soft skill issues don't
| get return offers and end up in faculty positions as a
| result.
| ykonstant wrote:
| >And the actual experience of a postdoc! Leave all your friends
| and move to a new city.
|
| Continent.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| science boasts empiricism but the institutions who 'teach'
| science don't have any empirical basis on how to do so
| efficiently
|
| yeah, its outdated, has been for a while
| LetThereBeLight wrote:
| A large issue is that PIs have no training on how to manage
| people nor is there much protection for grad students (and
| practically none for postdocs). It is surprisingly common to hear
| stories of sexual harassment, or international researchers
| essentially being held captive by their advisors. The
| universities are motivated to maintain their public appearance,
| and so cases of harassment and mistreatment are either entirely
| ignored or dealt with quietly. This, in addition to pay issues,
| is also playing a significant role in the unionization efforts
| that are taking place across US universities.
| oaiey wrote:
| What I found interesting of this article is that most of it is
| also applicable to a many tech sector jobs. High pressure to
| deliver something (because we squeeze the last of people), hire-
| and-fire practices everywhere, politics and toxic environments
| (because that is what people do and what is the current social
| perspective on what is okay).
|
| Developers, like scientists, are very outcome driven (number of
| lines, number of features, RoI, ...)
|
| The only - very big difference - is pay.
| abhayhegde wrote:
| I would say the job market is another stark differentiator.
| People with BS or MS degrees in CS would end up owning a job
| that an academic would have to wait until a tenure-track job to
| earn. The difference is CS jobs are obtainable right off the
| bat, while the tenure-track professorship requires a solid 8-10
| years post graduation.
| tptacek wrote:
| Having now two lab scientists living under my roof, there is
| nothing even in the stories I've heard of the video game
| industry that compares to how toxic research culture is. It is
| next-level, as if being vexatious was a goal on its own ---
| which, given the culture generation after generation of PIs
| have come up through, might at this point actually be the case:
| students and employees are threatened, berated, harassed, and
| coerced into ludicrous hours as part of a dues-paying process.
| michaelt wrote:
| I've heard of _incredibly_ variable experiences from people
| working on science PhDs.
|
| I've known maths PhD students who found they could only
| really do 2-3 hours of truly productive maths in a day,
| allowing them to spend the rest of the day playing games and
| suchlike, and after two years their supervisor told them
| they'd got enough interesting results to graduate.
|
| And I've known chemistry PhD students whose supervisors felt
| if you're doing a mere 8 hours a day of work you might as
| well drop out now because you're obviously not serious about
| graduating, and expected their students to be in the lab
| tending to long-running experiments on evenings, weekends and
| even christmas day. And yes, we only give you three years of
| funding but _everyone_ takes four years to graduate.
| nomadpenguin wrote:
| I think there's a huge division in toxicity between wet
| bench and computational/dry lab work. If your math PhD
| friends go on a wild goose chase or slack off for a few
| weeks, the only thing that is lost is time. In a wet lab,
| it could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. The
| stakes, stress, and constant attention required from
| experiments feeds into the toxicity in wet labs.
|
| Adding to that, a large portion of (important) wet bench
| work is mind-numbing manual labor. This work really should
| be done by a tech, but techs are just as if not more
| expensive than grad students, and techs can leave the job
| if they're not happy. Which means that grad students are at
| the bottom of the totem pole of intellectual respect, and
| PIs who had to do the same expect a lot more "due paying".
|
| Meanwhile, students in computational labs are working from
| home.
| tptacek wrote:
| I believe it. I've surveyed friends and friends of friends
| about chem and bio because one of my kids is a biochemist,
| and that's where most of my telemetry comes from; lab STEM
| in general has a bad rap, but chem and bio might be
| distinctively awful.
| f6v wrote:
| > how toxic research culture is
|
| ...at some labs. There're many-many places with good PIs,
| decent funding, retreats, events, etc. I don't get why people
| paint it as black and white.
| fullshark wrote:
| It's what you get when you put intelligent, ambitious and
| arguably insecure people in a high pressure environment with
| status/economic rewards and punishments. Also yes you are
| judged based on output not how cordial you are in the workplace
| or whatever. Sales I guess would also qualify.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Tech job hunts are easy in good times. (e.g. leave one
| employer, take a day off, interview at another employer the day
| after that, start working the week after)
|
| Academic jobs are nothing like that.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| notice that "leading" tech companies fixed this, with
| artificial hazing behavior in interviews, and changing the
| norms of hiring from two interviews to more than six, as
| widely reported.
| [deleted]
| golemotron wrote:
| If true, the terrible thing is that it is traumatic to even study
| this.
|
| There's no winning this one.
| tourgen wrote:
| [dead]
| stochastimus wrote:
| "Well-being and how to set healthy boundaries in your life and in
| your work is a fundamental skill," says Sharon Milgram
|
| What is this "life" you speak of?
| trabant00 wrote:
| [flagged]
| tptacek wrote:
| This has nothing to do with the article.
| trabant00 wrote:
| The article states multiple times that harassment, bullying,
| abuse and general toxicity is affecting science workers in
| general, but in particular women and minorities. My post
| states that said abuses are historically at a low point,
| especially for those groups, thus can not explain the rise in
| mental health issues.
|
| How exactly does this have "nothing to do with the article"?
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| It's nothing to do with the article because general
| societal trends may not be relevant within a specific
| industry.
| pelasaco wrote:
| But exactly the "general societal trends" are used to
| make a point, so how it's not related?
| pelasaco wrote:
| Your comment has everything to do with the article, but
| unfortunately, the "it has nothing to do with the article"
| is one of the issues with Science. To keep my argumentation
| on topic: Historically, scientists never had a so safe life
| like today. In the past, scientists used to put their life
| at stake. Galileo, Copernicus, Turin, Einstein..
| tptacek wrote:
| Yes, yes, one of the great challenges of modern science
| is that we're not murdering the scientists anymore.
| pelasaco wrote:
| > Yes, yes, one of the great challenges of modern science
| is that we're not murdering the scientists anymore.
|
| I hope that's not how you really understood it and you
| are just reducing the discussion to a childish level to
| try to get some points...
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Einstein?
| pelasaco wrote:
| "When Hitler came to power in January 1933, Einstein was
| in California and was almost immediately deprived of his
| posts in Berlin and his membership of the Prussian
| Academy of Sciences. His property was seized and his
| books were burned in public. Einstein never returned to
| Germany, and signed a letter to President Roosevelt
| alerting him to the fact that Germany might be developing
| an atomic weapon. He recommended that the US begin
| similar research."[1]
|
| [1]: https://www.wired.com/2012/06/famous-persecuted-
| scientists/
| [deleted]
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