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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

I really doubt that there is a place in the world for lazy, unambitious scientists.

Science productivity is nonlinear. Simple numerical example: if it takes you 20 hours/week just to keep up with the literature, teaching duties, etc, a scientist who works 35 hours/week is only half as productive as one who works 50 hours/week.

Additionally, science is cumulative. Those extra hours you put in build up your skills. This means that not only does the 50 hour/week scientist produce 2x as much as the 35 hour/week scientist, but his/her skills grow faster. So after a year, the 50 hour/week scientist not only has twice as many productive hours as the 35 hour/week scientist, but he/she also produces more per hour.

You may view the character traits exhibited by successful scientists as low status or unappealing. But that doesn't mean they are unnecessary.

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We like to think of the field of science as a meritocracy, but it is fraught with politics, trendiness, and other human pitfalls. I have known FAR more post-docs who burnt out than succeeded, and not because they were lazy or unintelligent. Interesting that you would categorize them as such. This is something that affects men and women.

> You may view the character traits exhibited by successful scientists as low status or unappealing.

This doesn't make any sense, except as a pot-shot. Status is what it's all about in science. Brilliant, low status people are failures.

I said hard work/ambition are necessary, not that they are sufficient.

I don't know man. Everything you say about productivity in science rings equally as true for computer programming. And yet it is possible to be a reasonably happy, reasonably productive software engineer and never work nights or weekends. Why is science fundamentally different? Is there less good work which needs to be done and can be done by not-super-brilliant people in science than there is in software engineerintg?

Is there less good work which needs to be done and can be done by not-super-brilliant people in science than there is in software engineerintg?

You nailed it. CRUD apps have considerable value. Low end theorems/experiments are almost worthless.

If you peruse a typical conference proceedings or journal issue, "low end theorems/experiments" in the sense of slogging away on incremental work is almost all of what scientists do. The big stuff is pretty unusual.

But even those "low end theorems/experiments" are generally novel and build on fairly cutting edge work. On the other hand you can pick up an Introduction to RoR book and have a successful career without ever venturing outside what that book teaches. There are few science jobs that require no knowledge beyond what you'll find in a first year chemistry book.

I'm a bit suspicious of your claim about it being that easy to have a career in tech. (But also a bit intrigued -- I'm in academia and looking for a plan B, given the state of the job market...)

There are lots of dull and simple programming jobs around like writing CRUD apps for a small department at a large government office in North Dakota. If you can manage to learn enough to get the hang of the basics of RoR or Visual Basic or whatever, you'll be able to find someone somewhere that is willing to pay something for your skills. Those sort of jobs just don't really exist within the sciences. Of course the question is if you actually want to do those jobs.

I agree that science (or any creative) productivity is non-linear, but you go on to give a linear example of 30 hours of work being worth twice as much as 15 hours, so I'm not quite sure what the final point is. An obsessive/single-track mindset is the most striking thing to me about this type of work, which probably does require more than 37.5 hours each week to maintain, but perhaps not every week, and almost certainly not in the 80-100 hr/week range that some young researches tend to work.

The example I gave was productivity(hours) = max(hours-20, 0). This is nonlinear.

My second paragraph explained how the gap between the 20 hours/week scientist and the 40 hours/week scientist grows with time.

I really doubt that there is a place in the world for lazy, unambitious scientists.

This is why very little scientific work is properly replicated and there are big distortions in the literature caused by scientists selectively publishing results that will seem fashionable in the current climate of opinion -- confirm a theory as it rises, and attack it as it peaks. There's an element of "timing the market" when publishing results.

It would be a big improvement if there were lots of competent scientists with secure jobs working a normal work week and publishing results that weren't distorted by the pressures that their ambitious careerist colleagues are subject to. They could try to replicate results and not worry if the answers they get don't further their careers. Why in the world wouldn't that be a good thing?

>> Science productivity is nonlinear.

Maybe you are right, if you try to do it the way the majority does it - brute-forcing and less-efficiently.

As a counter example, a friend of mine was able to graduate a Math PhD from MIT in 2.5 years, and at the same time using every vacation to the max to do mountaineering. One of his tactics is that whenever he does math, he doesn't think about anything else - this way he is not wasting the time.

I don't understand the economics. It sounds like you're saying that there's no place in the world for a fully trained (though perhaps less ambitious than before) scientist, so it's better to start from scratch with someone new, who presumably will take many years of training to get up to speed. I don't see how we can afford such a wasteful system?

On this occasion this book makes a lot of sense http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_%28book%29

What you provided above is its excellent summery! :)

"Science productivity is nonlinear." - any citations for that?

As I'm sure you are aware, it would be extremely difficult to define "science productivity" as an objectively measurable quantity. So no, neither I nor anyone else have citations related to this claim.

My claim is based primarily on inductive reasoning and personal experience. I know quite a few good scientists, none of whom have any semblance of a work life balance. And when I was a scientist, the job was as all consuming as doing a startup.

"it would be extremely difficult to define "science productivity" as an objectively measurable quantity"

Stepping back from the original article, what I would say is that a lot of the problems in academia are perhaps caused by inappropriate rewards systems based on the idea that academic research productivity can be measured over reasonably short timescales.

I'd actually be more in favor of much less overt short term performance evaluation for academics and accepting that some will, undoubtedly, squander this privilege while others would, I believe, more than reward society for this trust. Of course, this would probably be unacceptable politically as the emphasis there is often to minimize the negatives rather than to maximize the positives.

The problem is that the way the academic system is structured, the negatives are large and the positives are small. Take the author of this article - she was mistakenly given tenure, and she squandered 10-15 years of salary + unspecified severance.

The solution is simple - eliminate tenure. Then you can take a risk on a promising scientist - worst case, you fire him/her in a few years.

Tenure is meant to ensure that scientists have the freedom to work on topics that management deems worthless, but which may not be. Not to mention that people don't even get tenure until they are nearly 40 these days. It's not the problem.

Some institutions have eliminated tenure (especially in biochem), but run into the problem that you have to pay a lot more to get good scientists in that case, because scientists don't place zero value on tenure.

You may not even be able to get them at all, because there's a widespread perception that non-tenure-granting universities don't offer much academic freedom (especially in biochem, where they have strong ties with pharmaceutical companies). I could be wrong, but I don't believe these institutions have so far been successful in attracting top talent.

One hypothesis is that corporate research labs already occupy this ground well enough, so non-tenure-granting universities don't have much competitive advantage when looking for talent. If you don't care about tenure, want a higher salary, and are willing to accept the fact that management can review and direct your work, why work at a university at all? Why not Google Research or the R&D division of a pharmaceutical firm?

Er, she worked in the UK where tenure was abolished in the late 80's.

From the article:

"...I came home in 1989...to a tenure-track job, running my own research lab at a University of London institute, where I remained until the sad demise of my career...I got tenure..."

Good point, I'd missed that.

All the same, I'm not sure how she was on the tenure track given that no UK academic appointed (or promoted!) after 20 November 1987 has tenure. Perhaps there is a more complex story with her date of appointment, or perhaps, given that Science is a US publication, she is simplifying a tenure track equivalent UK position for a US audience.

Reference for the legislation: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/40/part/IV/crosshea...

But this is a side issue (my fault, I started it!), I'd agree with your basic point that tenure is a problem. Just, it's not the only problem and it wasn't the problem in this case.

I agree that the job is as consuming as a startup, but to call someone lazy for not wanting to sacrifice their person life, for their whole career is incredibly judgemental.

The big difference in a startup is that if you ideas really do work, after some number of years you will presumably be both quite wealthy and also have the time for a more reasonable work life balance.

Further, you seem to imply that it is all about science. It is not. There have been more than one scientist whose said that the amount of time they get to dedicate to actual research is the time they get when they get home at night.

The rest of the time is spent teaching, writing grants, and politicking. These are not things that all scientists want to do, and it's easy to understand why some become unmotivated.

Finally, in my opinion, one of the biggest negatives about being a scientist today is public opinion. The public feels you deserve to work on a minimum wage salary and that it's appropriate and correct for you to devote all your spare time to your job. Further, you best work on something the public deems useful to them, otherwise you are wasting time in your ivory tower.

It's hypocritical, because this level of judgement is not put on other jobs of similar skill level. I didn't even touch on the problems with the "publish X number of paper or perish" attitude that is all to common today.

I recommend reading Richard Hamming's talk "You and Your Research"

> Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!

> What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

I can think of a few, but "linear/nonlinear" doesn't seem like the right way to look at it. From what I've read, productivity has more to do with statistical distributions: http://xw2k.nist.gov/dads/HTML/lotkaslaw.html

Very curiously, these distributions are self-similar in that even when you restrict the sample to top-tier academics for instance, they still hold.

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