Comment by ryanmonroe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanmonroe | Hacker News Reader

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" In one study, participants who read that an artist was strongly passionate about his job said it was more legitimate for the boss to exploit the artist than those who read the artist wasn’t as passionate."

If you know someone who loves painting and a mural needs to be painted on Saturday, is it really crazy to think it's less bad to ask them to paint the mural than it would be to ask someone who has no passion for it at all? The question is not "Would you prefer a world in which we ignored the differences in passion and decided to never exploit anyone at all?", the questions is "Which is worse?". It does not say anything at all about whether people think these things are OK. If I tell you killing one person is less bad than killing two, that doesn’t mean I think killing people is OK.

"Participants read about a Ph.D. student’s working relationship with their graduate advisor. Those who read a scenario in which the student was being exploited – verbally abused and given unreasonable deadlines – rated the student as likely to be more passionate than students who weren’t being exploited."

Isn't that true though? If there's an identical distribution of passion across advisors at the start of the program and passion is negatively correlated with deciding to drop out in response to an exploitative advisor, people with exploitative advisors are therefore likely to be (although may not individually be) more passionate. It's essentially just asking if passionate people are more likely to continue towards a goal even in an exploitative environment, and has nothing to do with whether that is a good thing.

> Isn't that true though?

Not in the real world.

1. Like in any organization, the boss exploits the workers he doesn't like more than those he likes. Who he likes might be based a random factor like sense of humor/gender than ability.

2. People rarely drop out of phd programs (single digit percentage at most in my experience) because they don't want to fail. So, in actuality, the drop out rate difference exploitative advisors and good ones is too small to be significant.

3. Somewhat contrary to point 1., passionate students are usually better than uninspired students, and so passionate students usually have more leverage than the uninspired. They can switch advisors or schools - making the advisor look bad. In my experience the exploited ones are usually those who are in the bottom half of ability.

4. Its very difficult for advisors to "fire" a student usually. It reflects badly on them, and they usually have to go through a painful review process with the university to explain why the student was asked to leave. Therefore, advisors will usually treat horribly the students they don't like so they leave on their own accord.

That makes sense[1]. The point I was trying to make is that even if they think [x] is a bad thing, people may still answer that [x] is an accurate summary of reality. They may be wrong, but even so they’re still not making any normative judgement. The questions just aren't designed to give us insight into any of the things the article and my parent comment seem to think they do. They're asking about how reality is and then making assumptions about what the respondents think reality should be.

[1] Except #2. A large percentage of people drop out of PhD programs in America.

Single digit drop out for PhD programs does not sound right, I've believe the stat is closer to 50%:

https://www.chronicle.com/article/PhD-Attrition-How-Much-Is/...

The dropout rate varies significantly by discipline. My experience is only with the natural sciences where in North America at least, most students are funded by their program+advisor, compared to the humanities where funding opportunities are few and far in between.

I would guess that students who are funded by their advisor are much more likely to be exploited compared to the self-funded student because of the monetary exchange going on. But funded students are also less likely to quit because they have a relatively comfy job for five years that protects them from the "real world".

Also, if the student is there on a student visa than quitting could mean losing their visa.

> 1. Like in any organization, the boss exploits the workers he doesn't like more than those he likes. Who he likes might be based a random factor like sense of humor/gender than ability.

Much more likely to exploit workers who are hard working and competent. There isn't much to be gained exploiting unfriendly and unproductive people.

It wouldn't be a surprise if the boss like people who are the most hard working and competent and exploits them the most.

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