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I work in a large academic research lab and I'm with you on the lack of creativity and conformism. Most people here don't have ambitious ideas. They always think in terms of basic improvements to ideas that were recently published about. They seem to automatically think that progress can only be made in the direction of the latest cool papers from well-established authors in the field. Me, I'm with Peter Thiel... Don't compete. Differentiate yourself. Try to find a niche that everyone isn't already trying to fill.

People here are also seemingly very conformist. For the most part, they work extremely long hours, are in hetero-normative relationships, with similar life goals (get a high paying job, buy a house, have kids), they don't do drugs or rarely even drink. If they have any hobbies, it's going to be your typical going hiking and camping sort of deal.

I'm surprised that STEM research doesn't attract more "freaks" and free-thinking people. People who want to challenge assumptions and do things differently, explore new possibilities. Unfortunately, I guess where I am, the main draw is prestige and the possibility of getting a high paying job when you finish.

I'm surprised that STEM research doesn't attract more "freaks" and free-thinking people.

At least when I was at university, those people generally didn't have the focus to graduate with good grades (or graduate at all for that matter). It's one thing to sit around and talk about all the 'out there' implications of quantum physics. It's an entirely different thing to get your quantum physics course work in on time and study enough to pass the exam.

I think I'm one of the freaks in question. I'm not one to sit around pipe dreaming, but I've found a vastly better fit writing code at startups than I ever did in grad school.

I get to invent, experiment, learn, and at a vastly faster pace. I'm even working in the same field, solving similar problems to the ones I worked on in school.

This is great if the problems you want to solve have direct business applications with a turnaround time of tomorrow.

There aren't very many startups funding basic research, though.

I know. That's why I went back to grad school in the first place. Big mistake :)

I don't think there's such a clear link between nonconformity in the sense of having a "normal" lifestyle and nonconformity in research. Or at least I have never viewed people who don't drink as less creative in research than those who do (to use one of your examples). If anything, a conformist is more likely to drink given that most people do and that there is a lot of social pressure to drink.

I think the problem comes more from uncritically accepting standard practices or beliefs, not from just doing something superficially different from others.

I worked in an medium sized research lab while I was doing my graduate work in BioEngr. While I was doing research as an undergraduate I felt I had much more leniency to be free-thinking and out-there with my research/papers.

Once in grad school the reality of winning grants in 6-12 month cycles meant that the most successful PhD's were really much better at marshaling undergrads and master's students to do their work for them, rather than being elite, creative scientists themselves. I saw a lot of time being wasted tweaking previous research into something 'novel' so we could cite ourselves as much as possible and still put up a good introduction about doing something to improve society.

Ultimately, the lack of long-term vision coupled with a pretty unstable PI made me reconsider the academia route. As an aside, I was doing all of my advisor's "peer-review" of articles, reproducibility is a huge issue, I saw a ton of funky stuff submitted that I personally didn't have the time or budget to check, but couldn't in good faith outright reject, because I was also sending out papers to be reviewed.

Because of the way that STEM is taught, free thinking is often discouraged, and the 'freaks' leave academia as soon as possible or become conformist. This is not a new thing, Einstein was mocked for his free thinking ideas.

If that's the case, what is a non STEM bachelors degree that you would recommend for 'freaks'?

Philosophy.

Why philosophy? Additionally, some notable ceo's (Peter Thiel, Sergio Marchionne) also pursued philosophy degrees. Are philosophy degrees prevalent in c-suite exectives, and if so, why?

What institution are you at? We've got plenty of weirdos here where I work. I'm one such person.

Most things are a lot more fun when you're free to do them as you please and pick the good stuff. You get the fun stuff, they get all the stuff. :)

Running across an interesting book might feel like gold, makes you imagine research must be gold. You forget about the countless days, months, or years (sometimes even more depressing, decades) spent digging in between the gold veins.

I suffered from much the same disappointment when I started my PhD, after a masters that left me imagining research is a world of fun. Shortly after, I dropped it when I found a job/career that really brought me satisfaction. A move I have done more than once over the years after that.

So I have one advice for people who feel the disappointment of being "stuck" and not knowing what to chase: Consider just the work that passes the threshold for a decent standard of living and then pick the one that fulfills you more, rather that the one that makes others say "wow". Living on "kudos" means you're at the mercy of others to get your satisfaction.

I agree that academia selects for conformists, which is bad for curiousity driven research.

Jeff Schmidt's book "Disciplined Minds" makes a similar argument. I have not read it all, though, so perhaps I should pick it up again.

The book has a good description of the problem, but in my view the author views the process as more political than it necessarily is. I also think the book's solutions are unlikely to help. But I still recommend the book as one of the few on the subject.

Disciplined Minds is a great read.

Early on the book discusses some data that indicates more highly educated people tend to be more supportive politically of the government than the population in general. (E.g. during the Vietnam war lawyers defending anti-war activists in the US were trying to figure out how to pack juries with people who would be favorable to their clients and discovered that roughly the more educated someone was, the more likely they supported the government and would disapprove of anti war activism)

The book makes the argument that gaining professional credentials is less about gaining knowledge/skills, but more about demonstrating that one can be trusted to work in an organisational and confirm to the assigned goals/ideology of that organisation.

One rough argument made in the book is for workers performing roles with work that can be completely specified by superiors, it's less necessary for workers to demonstrate they can conform to how their employer wants them to think, provided they do the work. For professional roles involving more intellectual work where an employee's day to day tasks cannot be completely specified in advance, it's important for such employees to demonstrate they can think how the organisation wishes them to think, so an important part of training for these roles is essentially political training.

> One rough argument made in the book is for workers performing roles with work that can be completely specified by superiors, it's less necessary for workers to demonstrate they can conform to how their employer wants them to think, provided they do the work. For professional roles involving more intellectual work where an employee's day to day tasks cannot be completely specified in advance, it's important for such employees to demonstrate they can think how the organisation wishes them to think, so an important part of training for these roles is essentially political training.

Great summary. I guess my qualm is that this is not necessarily political. I'll admit it often is, but in my field I think people are often dedicated to bad ideas because of what I see as institutional inertia, the sunk cost fallacy, or not liking math, not just politics.

Jeff Schmidt's book "Disciplined Minds" makes a similar argument. I have not read it all, though, so perhaps I should pick it up again.

Having never heard of this book, I googled it after your mention and found this:

http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com

which immediately convinced me to order a copy. Sounds like fascinating stuff. Thanks for bringing this up!

Oof. Funny you mention that. I just bought it, but haven’t read it yet; only flipped through a little. It’s clearly a dangerous topic for me and if I can find the discipline in myself, I’ll return it before it’s too late.

Thanks for the thoughts, and the other comments here are all very lucid. These points aren’t lost on me, and I expect plenty of truth to them.

Norbert Wiener's book "Invention" is another on a similar topic. He argues that research should be driven more by the interests of individual researchers rather than managers and bureaucrats.

Research will always be driven by the interests of whoever is financing it. It just happens that it's almost never the researchers themselves.

And one thing to consider: a researcher's mind is an inquisitive mind that will "dig" even in directions nobody really cares about, don't help humanity, etc.

The one upside of someone else giving the direction is that you can be sure that there will be some concrete benefit from it. The downside is that it's mostly about money and power...

> The one upside of someone else giving the direction is that you can be sure that there will be some concrete benefit from it.

Wiener argues that this often is not true, because the people with the money often have a poor understanding of what's actually important.

To give an example, in my own area of research, my impression is that most industrial folks hate math. They consistently deny the benefit of it. As a theorist who tries hard to do practical work, I find it very irritating for my work to be written off by industry for a bad reason. I went to a conference a few weeks ago, and it was clear that industry folks won't attend my talks, but when I spoke with some of them in private they seemed much more interested in what I knew. It may be mostly an advertising problem, but I still have the math barrier to break through. My mantra now is "math is cheap", which seems to resonate with people who are used to paying tons of money for new experiments which usually don't give you useful information. At the very least I can tell them what sort of experiments would be valuable based on my theoretical understanding.

Ultimately, we need a balance of input from those with money and those with more detailed knowledge. This is what I strive for. At the moment I'd say the vast majority of research is directed from above, so I'd agree with Wiener that we need to move in an individualistic direction.

I won't claim to understand the topic better than this author but one thing I know: important is an incredible subjective concept. So I will quote the perspective of another writer. In Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind there's a chapter dedicated to research (the Sugar Daddy of Science). The short version is you have limited resources. You can't invest in every research project. You are more likely to invest in the ones that increase those resources or to try to solve a pressing issue at that time.

There is no scientific answer to the questions "Which project to fund? What is good? What is important?", only political, economic, or religious reasons. Science studies for the sake of expanding human knowledge and satisfying curiosity.

What's important for you, the scientist? Finding a cure for Alzheimer or developing a new semiconductor? What's more important for the person funding it?

So I will argue that "having a poor understanding of what's important" in a generally valid conclusion about anyone. And unfortunately I am acutely aware that a scientist might just be curious enough to spend money on studies that will bring no palpable benefit to anyone but his own curiosity sometimes. While this is an admirable academic exercise, is it better than any other study that produces in the end a more palpable result, like money?

I might be to cynical or pragmatic but sometimes there's no going around it. Just recently I read about a new archaeological dig that uncovered a viking toilet and could finally describe their approach to human waste over the centuries. While this definitely increased the total human knowledge, can you imagine a more practical way of spending that money? I can assure you someone a poor understanding of what's actually important could :). Or at the very least you can expect that they will be able to identify the "importance" based on the financial and profitability aspects.

I agree that the problem of selecting which research to fund is difficult and (usually but not always) subjective. While a very interesting question, it's not actually relevant to what I was arguing. I'm getting the impression that you didn't understand one of my points, so I'll restate it in more detail.

> While this is an admirable academic exercise, is it better than any other study that produces in the end a more palpable result, like money?

You seem to believe that research results in the most revenue when managers and bureaucrats are in control, but I disagree. Wiener's argument is that managers and bureaucrats often don't even accomplish their stated goals (which should be fairly objective) due to their lack of subject knowledge, e.g., in your example, how to increase revenue. Required subject knowledge makes the right path forward invisible to most people. Many people are fond of efficient market type arguments suggesting these things are unlikely, but if the number of eyes who can spot the problem is small, efficient market ideas don't work.

Jacob Rabinow, a prolific inventor, had a list of "laws", and this is one of them, which basically summarizes the problem:

> When a purchaser, who doesn't know the difference between good technology and garbage, orders "good technology," he will always get garbage.

If someone can't tell the difference between good quality research and bad quality research, they'll likely optimize on cost or some other axis and make a poor decision.

I try hard to provide value to industry, but I find that industry folks avoid the sort of theoretical engineering work I do because they don't like math. Again, some of this is a marketing failure on my part, but this is only a fraction of the problem in my view. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

Some of this seems to stem from managers and bureaucrats not trusting researchers. Yes, many researchers would waste the money, but this to me is similar to managers and bureaucrats wasting money because they don't know what they're doing. I see no reason to be "acutely aware" of researchers' faults but not the faults of managers and bureaucrats. Ultimately we need a hybrid approach, not the largely top-down manager and bureaucrat controlled approach we have right now.

> When a purchaser, who doesn't know the difference between good technology and garbage, orders "good technology," he will always get garbage.

That may be perfectly right but I think we're both right only when taking it to an extreme. A purchaser might as well understand the technology very well. Just as a researcher could be a manager at some point.

The problem lies with "pure" researchers and bureaucrats. They will always see just their way so there's no middle ground. The perfect situation happens just by accident, where the researcher's curiosity happened to intersect with the bureaucrat's ideal money maker. And much of this is down to how each one communicates the expectation: the scientist doesn't know how to state his goal in terms of benefits that the bureaucrat can understand, and the bureaucrat doesn't know how to ask for things in therms that the scientist would understand.

But take the military for example. Their currency is power. And they are perfectly able to drive research in that direction even without being driven by scientists.

And yes, bureaucrats don't trust the researchers with their money. It's because a manager investing in research is like a bet with long odds, where you don't know what exactly you're betting on, and the bookie is a gambler himself. Scientists get guaranteed money without guaranteeing a result. And "worse", a success for the scientist doesn't really mean success for the manager. You are happy you have an interesting result, or a confirmation. The manager is happy if his investment was worth it in terms of time and money.

A more practical example would be if you paid someone to build you a manor and after years of work he comes with a hangar. Unless you're able to monetize on that it's a failure.

Every one of my former colleagues learned to sell their knowledge in terms of benefits a manager understand. It's easier for you to understand their language than for them to understand yours.

> And yes, bureaucrats don't trust the researchers with their money. It's because a manager investing in research is like a bet with long odds, where you don't know what exactly you're betting on, and the bookie is a gambler himself. [...] The manager is happy if his investment was worth it in terms of time and money.

Wiener has an entire chapter on this. Research is a gamble by its nature and will rarely ever appear to be a good investment to a bureaucrat or manager. As I recall, Wiener seemed to want to move away from this model towards funding individual researchers with good track records, for this reason and also because management often does not understand what's important. While I do want to provide value to industry, I don't expect them to fund my research because they seem to be allergic to math in my field.

You also seem to be confusing research with development. If someone is asking for a manor, that's not research in my view. If someone is asking for a structure with certain properties and it's not obvious what the answer is immediately, that's research. Research often returns unexpected answers even when done intellectually honestly.

> Every one of my former colleagues learned to sell their knowledge in terms of benefits a manager understand. It's easier for you to understand their language than for them to understand yours.

I try, but it's frustrating when most industry folks lose interest you once you mention basically any math. As you've said, it's a learned skill, which I'm still learning. There are no guarantees, unfortunately.

> All my friends with PhDs are unhappy, and do not enjoy doing research. They are all intelligent, some a little bit creative, and only curious when forced. They are experts of citations (a tease that never gets old to me, sorry) and I’m afraid are most concerned with not being left behind or achieving prestige.

> Having had countless long late-night chats with them in empty bars about this, I gather their habits of conformity got them that far and let them down once they were on their own. They consistently think what I’m doing in my life is more interesting than theirs. I think the opposite and would die to be in their shoes.

Huh. You'd think they'd just leave academia and go into industry after getting their Bachelors or maybe their Masters.

I mean, I'm fairly uncreative and conformist, but I noped out of college after getting my Bachelors and went right into industry. I'm currently more than happy working at an enterprise telecom in a conservative suburb, and I'm glad I didn't stick around in academia.

> They consistently think what I’m doing in my life is more interesting than theirs. I think the opposite

The grass is always greener

Sure. Fair. But reason can resolve a bit more detail here if we try. Particularly, I am struck that there is such little complaint over the status quo of citation dependence. Popularly speaking, of course there is, but researching PhDs just make their days of it with barely a fuss. Shouldn’t that be particularly concerning? In recognition of the congruency this has with what the authorities demanded of me when I argued with my teachers over subject matter in high school, it is infuriating. When this is what you were asking for all along, how can you be so surprised that it’s what you got?

It does raise a question of how the grass is green, and why it’s on the other side.

Fun fact: The grass on the hillsides in the opening sequence of The Sound Of Music was actually painted by hand. It was worth it for the altitude and the Austrian mountain backdrop.

By "citation dependence" I assume you mean that researchers are judged by how many citations their own work has received. This is an time-efficient, yet imperfect mechanism to measure the importance of a research work.

Are there more accurate ways to measure the importance/impact/relevance of research work?

Intelligent in their ability to memorize or are they making original contributions to their fields and advancing the state of the art?

Can you elaborate what you mean when you say, "experts of citations"?