Why Aren’t There More Scientists? Money | Hacker News Reader

Why Aren’t There More Scientists? Money

phenomena.nationalgeographic.com

99 pointsmyth_drannon85 comments

As a former professional scientist (I will always be a scientist, just not one who earns a living from science), the problem is not money directly, but the encouragement of students into becoming professional scientists when there is no money to support them when they finish their training.

Ideally, we would want essentially everyone interested in pursuing science to do so, and succeed. No?

You seem to be saying that we should rather limit the number of scientists than pay for the ones we can train.

In an ideal world yes I would love to see everyone who has a talent and interest in science pursue it.

The amount of money is mostly outside of the control of science, but encouraging students to become professional scientists when you know there is no funding to employ them at the end of their training is immoral. Until the funding situation changes then we need to stop misleading students about what to expect.

It's been known for at least 20 years that there is no money in non-corporate non-engineering science. But perhaps that advertising doesn't reach young student.

> You seem to be saying that we should rather limit the number of scientists than pay for the ones we can train.

This is still an open question. At least in biomedical sciences, there's been an explosion in the number of PhDs awarded. Biomedical postdocs get paid ~$40k/year on average, and it's increasingly likely they'll be stuck in that position for 10+ years (or you'll leave for a non-science job). I luckily won't have to go through that, but most of my friends are.

An alternative is produce less, better paid, better trained scientists.

Very few areas outside of computer science and some applied mathematic fields have anything other than very dismal job prospects.

Even if you manage to grab the brass ring and get tenure after 15 to 20 years of low paid study, this is hardly secure. If you fail to bring in large amounts of grant funding you will soon find yourself on your own in the basement broom closet or made redundant in the next departmental reshuffle.

I'm sure comp sci could use some of them. Hopefully we can start attracting the same amount of women as Bio* fields, that would do a lot to redistribute STEM labour towards better compensation and alleviate supply issues in the market (on both ends).

The amount of STEM PhDs is a mere blip compared to software engineer demand.

> Ideally, we would want essentially everyone interested in pursuing science to do so, and succeed. No?

This isn't obvious to me. What if that was everyone?

I would love to live in a world where everyone wanted to be a scientist.

Would you like to live in a world where everyone actually was a practicing scientist? Who would build houses? Where would lab equipment come from?

Yes I would. Being a scientist is about the way you view the world and what you understand rather than the job you do day to day. I still consider myself a practicing scientist despite no longer earning a living being one.

A world where everyone approached problems with a scientific mindset would be one I would love to live in.

You don't enjoy non-scifi arts and literature?

I sure do. People with scientific training are just as capable of producing art as anyone else. My personal experience is scientists are more interested in the arts and literature than the average person of equivalent education.

You've gone kind of far afield from the idea that anyone who wants to should be able to go through grad school and then support themselves in an academic job afterwards.

We want only people who have talent (top 1-5% of population) to pursue science. Majority of "science" produced by Ph.Ds outside of top 10-20 programs is complete junk that contributes very little if any to humanity.

At least in the fields I'm familiar with, the top 20 universities don't have anything near a monopoly on major advances. Especially if you consider advances that were actually made there, vs. people who did their important work elsewhere and then were hired away by the top-20 university once they were already famous. I could see it being true in some small fields where there are only 20 serious programs to begin with, but in a big field like CS it's not the case.

Agree completely. One of the best things I found about American Research System is that good research happens in many universities and not just the top/Ivy League ones. The benefits from this cannot be overstated: research is a speculative field, and the only way to increase the probability of "success" is to have many different people trying different approaches.

Unpopular opinion , but very true

"And succeed" is the problem there. Research by its very nature is speculative. So it becomes a game of probabilities, you want to find the sweet spot balancing funding with progress. Paying for everyone who wants one to have a lab and a supercomputer, would not be a good use of society's resources.

I studied physics. I wanted to pursue research. The only tenable (I needed income - not everyone has parents who will pay their way through school, buy them a house, buy them a car - mine left me high and dry and paying both my and my brother's living and school costs) job options that involved research involved making weapons. Actual research jobs pay so little you need to have parents or a spouse subsidising you.

So I went and worked in finance instead.

I never really understood it, what's so wrong with making weapons?

The jobs are in making a particular kind of weapon.

Obviously that depends on your personal ethics. A lot of the professional ethics training for structural and automotive engineers, for example, stresses the fact your products shouldn't kill people.

Obviously some people make weapons so not everyone believes they have the same obligations.

Well, I work in weapons industry (I wasn't able to do a thesis because public labs doesn't have money).

So what's wrong with it?

First, things I work on are sold to both sides, in my case to a country well known to shit on human rights... And a few GUI/feature tweak later it's sold to another more respectful one.

Also, in a more general way, the main purpose of it is to kill or fear peoples, peoples with different/unaccepted ideas, peoples who disagree with the weapons owner.

Does it sound right to you?

Of course it's approved by the government, but it sounds way more like a money driven decision than a smart one. And when I ask people how they feel about it, nobody cares, typical responses:

"We are not working on a weapon, we are working on --any subsystem that doesn't sounds like a weapon--"

"I'm not the one who sell it!"

So it's nobodies fault, like during the WW2, "I'm just driving the train, I have nothing to do with deportation"

Without weapons you cannot have an army, and without an army you are instantly conquered by some raging lunatic despot who happens to have one. Having more advanced weapons than the loonies is a blessing IMO.

OK now justify selling weapons to the loonies like 90% of arms manufactures or their customers do. For last 50 years, US enemies fight using US provided weapons.

And what happens when the conquering despot is my country (Dick Cheney's team)

That's foreign policy, that doesn't have much to do with the manufacturing of weapons. Weapons manufacturers just provide weapons to their country and it's the country's (politicians) job to make wise use of it.

Saying "I don't feel comfortable doing X" is not the same as saying "no one should do X". I'd feel the same about not wanting to work for a casino, or a lab that makes better tobacco products, but oddly enough not a brewery.

Mostly that it's a zero-sum endeavor that in the aggregate, doesn't make the world a better place.

Imagine if worldwide knowledge of science regressed to 1900 levels. Imagine if worldwide engineering capabilities regressed to 1900 levels. Imagine if worldwide educational opportunities regressed to 1900 levels. We would consider any of these things to be disastrous.

Now imagine if worldwide weapons technology regressed to 1900 levels... that doesn't really seem all that bad, does it. You could even come up with a strong argument for it being a good thing.

Investing money and effort into making weapons is the literal definition of an arms race. A zero-sum game. If everyone does it, everyone loses. This would obviously never happen but if every single engineer in the world refused to work on developing new weapons, the world would be a better place tomorrow.

The exact same thing can be said about marketing and advertisting - it's a zero-sum arms race game that consumes tons of resources and doesn't contribute anything. And yet, people don't have that much moral reversations about working at Google or Facebook.

Among creative folks, there actually is a strong aversion to working in marketing/advertising. Most writers/artists consider such a career to be "selling out." It's their equivalent to engineers working on weapons technology.

Regarding Google: They work on a ton of products that genuinely make the world a better place. Gmail, google search, google news etc etc. That does give the company as a whole a halo.

Regarding Facebook: I somewhat agree with you that social media in general is overrated, but many others do genuinely believe that it improves their quality of life. I may not buy it myself, but Facebook can make a strong case for how they are making the world a better place by better connecting people.

That's a negative sum race, not a zero sum race.

The money is in entertainment: NFL, Hollywood, etc.

A little over a week ago, HN pondered a question based on essentially the opposite premise: "Why do so many people continue to pursue doctorates?" [0]

The submission garnered some unbelievably sour comments about graduate research (the top comment, in particular).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11543439

> unbelievably sour

Thanks for the pointer. Just checked, and I don't find that sour at all, only mildly realistic.

There's a reality distortion field generator running somewhere ...

Reality distortion field generator? That sure sounds like curiosity-driven research--- get out of here and write a real grant!

Curiosity?! Pah. Outmoded victorian values. Curiosity killed the cat.

Now keep your head down and publish the good facts we give you.

Basically we have no problem paying a lawyer who profits from adversarial divorces $400K per year; but people blanche at scientists with PHDs getting more than $100K-$150K per year.

So we've ended up with more lawyers and less scientists.

Lawyers make their own work - having said that junior lawyers these days are not doing so well.

The problem is scientists produce something that is valuable (knowledge), but this value is near impossible for them to capture.

In my experience few scientist worry about the low rate of pay, but the total uncertainty of funding. Many would trade an even lower pay rate for some certainty that they would still have a job in a couple of years time.

Are those pronouns referring to the same people? It seems like you're indicting humanity for being human.

Blaming a collective for a collective failure is just as okay as blaming an individual for an individual failure.

There is no divorce lawyer making a $400k salary. If they make that much, they are entrepreneurs. There are plenty of PhD entrepreneurs who make millions a year. Compare apples to apples.

I didn't actually type "salary" in my original post...

I don't really know enough about how lawyer partnerships work as a legal entity, to be able to definitely say 1 way or the other.

Would a large Boston firm with multiple partners, that was financially successful, pay a partner in a firm $1 million a year? Yes, easily; but is the partnership just "how lawyers do things" or "entrepreneurship"? I can't say.

"According to the Boston sources whom we interview, a competent divorce litigator in Boston earns a minimum of $1 million per year. Is that sufficient compensation for a loss of illusions regarding human nature? Only you can decide!"

From Philg's (Philip Greenspun, another famous LISP user) site here: https://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2015/07/28/divorce-litigator... (his comment #6)

IMO partners are closer to "legal management." So at that point the engineering equivalent would be "engineering management." Directors and VPs of engineering firms probably earn in the range of $1 million. Some very very senior engineers at FB/Microsoft/Google probably earn that much as well (principal engineer-level)

Maybe they are being paid for their usefulness, having a PhD certificate is not in itself useful.

Neither is a law.

But a $400k/year divorce lawyer is useful for the one paying, that´s the point. Who should be paying the salaries to whoever decides to "be a scientist"?

The vast majority of lawyers don't make such salaries. People actually have desires to be public defenders, for example, and they definitely aren't paid well. I'm not sure prosecuting attourneys are either. I'm going to assume divorce lawyers get a bit more. Some of the better civil attorneys won't take a case that doesn't have a good enough payout, but the ones helping the cases just above the line probably aren't doing well either and are completely dependant on whether enough people that can afford their services would sue. I doubt bankruptcy attourneys get paid nearly so much either.

The entire system is unfair. Amount of education or amount of work means nothing. It is basically tied not only to the field of study (teachers and engineers can have the same education, yet get wildy different monetary opportunities), but whether or not you get lucky and live in the right area.

Money would help but so would dismantling the feudal system that controls it. Remember the guy who cured ulcers? His story is an insight into how dysfunctional science is.

For those wanting to know more about this the OP is talking about the discovery of Helicobacter pylori [1] as the cause of almost all stomach ulcers [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_peptic_ulcer_disea...

Which guy, and what's the story?

There were two guys.

Barry Marshall and Robin Warren.

What does the average postdoc make in STEM? Something like 40k. Wanting a family and having to be a slave to the job for pennies on the dollar was a big disensentive for me. Also, I would never move away from Canada and I feel le there were even fewer opportunities here.

Postdoc is a temporary job. It's a segue between training and an independent position. The pay rate is not very important because you're not supposed to do it for more than two or three years. Then it's up or out.

In many science disciplines it's not uncommon for someone to do two or ever three postdocs while looking for more permanent employment. The underlying cause is the same reason people settle for the low pay and poor job security of being an adjunct: there isn't much else you can do, just work hard, hope, and wait.

As the article mentions, even if you do grab the brass ring, a lot of your time and energy ends of being spent on writing grants and management. My first job out of college was working for an ecologist. Her entire NSF grant was $70k over 5 years. Out of that she had to pay my room and board at a remote field location as well as my salary. There was almost nothing left over for equipment and supplies. It was always a question whether the money would come through to allow her to continue doing her research.

The problem is most scientists now days aren't real scientists. They are closer to laboratory workers or even bureaucrats. What we need to do is reform science as a whole, the very methodology's that we accept for science. Science does not = scientific method, that's a small subset, but we've become deluded into thinking that's all science is. Until we see science as more, scientists will be limited

I wanted to be a scientist and study physics. I found that working with computers paid better than being a scientist unless one beco es popular.

Seeing a kindergarten friend of mine being among the top 10 in ecology and living like a hobbo like his friends and doing spectacular research and not giving up, I don't think it is money.

I think it is the pressure of company fueled academism in bending the research to censor research that is the real problem.

Corpo and governement are censoring and fighting research by underfunding and noising the environment with shitty science made to make a point.

Don't tell me Science could not detect the diesel gate sooner, yes they could, but government preferred to fund diesel optimistic research.

Don't tell me the thyroid problem happening in every nuclear polluted region could not be detected sooner (Eastern Europa, Japan...) they were. But, it has been silenced by focusing on the cancers.

Don't tell me Fourier books on the contribution of human activity to the global warming of earth (1824) was not written, and thus that this knowledge is "new".

Science, like justice, should be independent from government and economical powers.

Universities should be autonomous.

It was certainly money that kept me out.

Does he have rich, supportive parents, by any chance?

no, he is ready to live like a hobbo and make a lot of sacrifices most people don't.

In that case, good for him. I'm likewise prepared to live like a hobo and have done my time being homeless and having a bundle of tags to sleep in to my name - but I had financial dependents which precluded any selfish endeavour. Such is reality for many.

> Universities should be autonomous.

Absolutely. How do you make it so? You secure funds for them. Universities aren't independent when they have to seek funding from various special interests.

Similarly, judges are independent because their income doesn't depend on their decisions. That income allows them to refuse "gifts" from either the plaintiff or the defendant.

We have a lot of scientists. Just the US government spends 140+ billion per year and 1.4 trillion per decade on R&D. The problem is we simply try and push more people into those fields than we are willing to pay for. Research is important in the short and long term, but I think the U.S. would be better off focusing more on infrastructure and less on research.

A few pipes to move fresh water from dry to wet areas of the country would not cost all that much. A few more subways in major city's could do a lot. 10% or 14 billion could go to projects that more than pay for themselves in a few years.

PS: Yes, a big chunk of that is military R&D, they can also get cut.

There is no lack of resources to support science, just a lack of political will to fund it. When it comes to government funding there is not a set amount of funding for each area. If there is political will it will get funded.

The scientist who help kill the SSC [1] found this out the hard way - they thought that the money would flow back into other areas of science, but in the end it just went back into the main budget and no other area of science got more money

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_peptic_ulcer_disea...

I get the feeling that any scientific jobs that actually pay in accordance with their merit are those that have been entirely consumed by current industrial pursuits.

Uh, why does "This means that my work will never result in a marketable product, a useful machine, a prescribable pill, a formidable weapon, or any direct gain." imply "she’s the real deal" in any way? If your definition of science includes "completely useless for all practical purposes", of course there's not going to be very much money.

"All practical purposes" for a discovery is not always immediately apparent.

What if there was no tenure and the pie would be re-divided based on performance every year? If that would disproportionately help the more productive scientists, wouldn't that help attract more funding for science and make the pie bigger for everyone? Why can't science work like the rest of the world?

What criteria do you propose to evaluate performance? And how do you plan to compare the performance between different sciences or different areas in some science?

Good point. The NSF somehow manages to do this, although I'm sure it doesn't always do it well. Other than individual sports, I don't think there's a field of human endeavor that has a perfect system for measuring performance.

Part of the problem is that an imperfect measure often isn't better than no measure, unless you're very careful about how the measurement is used. You end up with people devoting huge amounts of resources to gaming the metrics, which produces worse outcomes than even not evaluating people at all would.

I've thought that a rolling tenure system would be cool. Depending on how risky your research is, you can apply for 5, 10, 15, or 20 year chunks of time in which you are guaranteed a position at the University. This would allow professors to take on longer term weird or crazy research projects, but would prevent professors from defacto retiring immediately after hitting associate professor.

What is the purpose of the rolling tenure? If the finite length is meant to serve as a stick, I would argue that it is useless. People who do good fundamental research do it because there is nothing else that gives them the satisfaction. Yes there may be a few who defacto retire after hitting the assuared tenure, but if this rolling tenure becomes the norm that would add additional unnecessary risk to most. Fundamental research is risky, and we need people to go down the wrong and useless path to mark it such to keep others from going down that route. The finite length tenure is not conducive to the risk taking process.

So like pro sports players, except divided by 1000?

Basic research, in the short term, can only be motivated by a thirst for knowledge. The kind of psychology that allows us to devote our lives to things that will only show up on a factory floor years after our death is absolutely different than the kind of psychology that drives us to till the fields and pivot our verticals.

The fact is, no self-utility optimizing human will see with a horizon beyond one lifetime. Governments can barely do it, and corporations can hardly see into the next quarter.

It's old hat to complain about lack of money in science. Instead, ask, how can I fund my knowledge producing project? "Public funds" is not always the answer.

Lately I have binged on the television show "Fringe"(2008–2013). Good example of science gone off the deep end.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1119644/

I can't help but see publicly-funded science as deprecated in favor of market-driven science. There's simply too many fields for government largesse to really be able to fund in force. I wish it didn't have to be so subject to the whims of popular opinion, but really, I can't think of a better way.

Markets do a terrible job of funding basic research because it rarely pays off within commercial timeframes. Or even lifetimes. But it's obviously vital to a society long-term.

I agree, but like I said, I can't think of a more politically acceptable alternative. Maybe one day science will get sexy again and POTUS will be able to do Obamacare for science. Until then it's up to the markets.

Is charity a market mechanism? I honestly don't know. But apparently there has been a trend toward more private funding of basic research:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction...

It is. There is competition for altruism and organized processes oriented around collecting it.

It's not just that the research may not pay off for a long time, but it's very hard to tell what is useful research from what isn't. Poking at all sorts of things with sticks seems necessary.

(There's another question as to how useful technology actually is, but I'll avoid going there for now.)

Markets and information goods play very poorly.

Actually, markets and many goods play far more poorly than most people, and all free-market fundies, believe.

I'm not saying markets aren't powerful. But they're horribly inaccurate. And that includes at achieving Pareto efficiency.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com