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Comment by nnfy | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps your experience was different from mine. I went to a well known, buy non ivy league school, and grad school for myself and most, not all, of those around me was more about faking it until you made it into industry.

Plenty of junk science, including a thesis I decided not to publish, while my advisor wanted the extra points on his resume. Many PHD students are stuck because they got a hard stem degree (like physics) but realized that job pickings were a little slim without further academic development. Or they are foreigners and cannot stay in the U.S. without studying.

Passion does not always last forever. Especially when you got off-ivy league schools. Didnt you hear stories in school about graduate students who were simply stuck for a decade because of lack of interest from them and/or their advisor? Not totally farfetched.

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Yeah...I saw this about an hour ago, and bit my tongue. But it is dismaying that apparently the reverence for science is so high around here that it extends to downvoting criticisms of science as a process and sociological phenomenon to oblivion.

Maybe it will help these poor fellows if I say look, I have a PhD, I work in research, and I agree with everything krick says. Yes, papers are unnecessarily jargonistic and borderline illegible. Yes, there are massive problems with the incentive structure in science. We openly say science is "publish or perish"; how can we not expect that to incentivize lower paper quality, irreproducibility, and status signalling in the form of unnecessary jargon? Even if we assume the noblest of intentions for every single scientist, which is...idealistic.

spaceseaman is equating (IMO unfairly) criticism of the process of science in its current US manifestation with some kind of disrespect towards its obvious beneficial outcomes and motives. The whole thing IS full of inefficiency, and that's not solely because science is hard. Taxpayers have a right to demand that we don't waste their money and perhaps even to present our findings in a way they can understand with a reasonable application of effort (ideally not paywalled as well).

Well, the problem is that people so often go motte-and-bailey on it.

Motte: all the valid critiques of how institutional science works, all of which are well-known.

Bailey: full Paul Ryanism, cut the NSF and NIH to the fucking bone and tell scientists to go get "real jobs" in industry. Subject academics to yet more administration and reporting requirements that further incentivize bad science and just generally make everyone miserable.

We'd all be less tetchy about the motte if it wasn't used as an excuse for the bailey.

Thank you explaining my frustration in such a clear way. My original response was so feral because I interpreted his comment as a criticism of all scientists and a call to change the current University system to something more "libertarian" (because those are arguments I'm frequently exposed to, and the comment I responded to appeared to dog-whistle similar ideas).

I am perfectly happy to admit that institutional science is screwed up - really bad. Scientific texts are often un-readable, and the entire community has major systemic issues. But I react incredibly poorly to the opinion that scientists enjoy this system or even benefit from it. We hate the way academia is structured. It's just that no one can figure out anything better and the benefits for enough people are important enough that swaying them is incredibly difficult.

>We hate the way academia is structured. It's just that no one can figure out anything better and the benefits for enough people are important enough that swaying them is incredibly difficult.

It's also that everyone who wants to do science is held hostage to this system. There is no other institution focused on original research, beyond shipping a product within three to five years.

Academia sucks. There are no full-time research positions for good researchers anymore; grant funding has gotten as selective as the startup lottery. Even the people who "make it" have to work horrendous hours and spend all their time marketing themselves.

Even from the very outset, you're forced to put your heart on the line, declare science your calling and your passion, and then just suck it up when you can't find a tenure-track job.

Some fields don't have an "Exit" option that makes anything better, just a "Voice" option or bust. Besides which, every "Exit" is a betrayal of the social contract, a tiny declaration that society would rather rot and burn than fix problems like mature adults.

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