Comment by neuronic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neuronic | Hacker News Reader

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A PhD is slave work and exploitation as 'right of passage'. Afterwards, it continues with post-docs. It's all about names and prestige from here on.

I saw enough of it to make me question ethics and morality in that space which is more akin to investment banking than the sort of ideal young students are led to believe in.

It's not all for the lofty goal of broadening knowledge. That's merely a side effect. It's really about grants and impact scores because that's how scientists make a living.

E.g. the mental gymnastics I have seen to make data fit enough for that Cell publication are possible because the enormous complexities of microbiology allow for it and these possibilities are actively exploited because that's how you make money and talent flow. Otherwise, impact scores would also benefit from science that finds out how thing's don't work. That's important knowledge too - but none that collects grants.

Science really isn't a more ethical field than any given industry and one shouldn't build their career on such idealisms.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's not. It would be wrong to unconditionally assert either way.

I did a pure mathematics PhD and was given a general area to look at and a problem to solve but that was really just a starting point, I had the flexibility to solve something related so long as it was interesting. The papers I published had my sole authorship; not even my supervisor's name was on them (except in the acknowledgements). I spent much of my time, for several years, in a room on my own with nothing more than a pencil and paper (except occasionally a book). All I did was sit there and think hard. It was glorious, and definitely not slave labour.

Postscript: I did not go into academia. The PhD helped me get (and do) my job afterwards, possibly not as much as if I had worked in industry that whole time, but it was a fulfilling life experience.

I also did pure mathematics, and this summarises my experiences perfectly.

Pure mathematics I believe it's a field on its own: for one, you have salaries but no huge costs with equipment/material.

The work is also more independent and not connected to anything outside of mathematics in principle (though the work might evolve to something interesting to huge backers, think Number Theory or Control Theory/Finance/etc)

> A PhD is slave work and exploitation as 'right of passage'.

You can't assume all fields like that. I know that some people here on HN have described PhD programs in lab-based STEM fields as killer hours, low pay, and lots of carrying water for their supervisors. But in my own discipline at least (a subbranch of linguistics), a PhD is typically paid with an ordinary European middle class salary, and the topic is chosen by the student and only agreed to by the supervisor, so you aren’t being slave labour for the supervisor’s own ends.

... and you are likely unionized. And this state of affairs is likely the result of past decades of action by senior and junior academic staff, and without it - would likely be (and possibly is being) eroded.

This depends a lot on the field and the lab. Humanities PhDs have terrible career prospects, but are not generally exploited as cheap labour like PhDs in a lot of science fields.

I agree with you about grants and impact scores, though.

Humanities tend to have much lower stipends such that it needs to be supplemented with tons of teaching assistantships.

That depends on the country and on the field. In certain Western European countries, for instance, funding may be adequate without teaching duties.

I really do agree in the time I spent as a graduate student and postdoc I saw so many questionable data "massaging" tricks that aren't including with the paper methods. Oh the copy number segment doesn't cover the gene I'm interested in but it looks like it should be copy number 4 and not copy number 2, therefore; I will hand edit the file and fix these issues for all 100+ samples in my study. I think parts of this kind of "massaging" is slowly changing as more and more people push for open access data and open access code. Science would benefit greatly from having access to the raw data and code used to generate the conclusions of a given paper.

As a graduate student there is some level of protection from a supervisor punishing you if you have differences in opinion but as a post-doc those kinds of protections are tossed out the window. I have a friend who was 3 years into their post-doc and had an argument with their principle investigator about the interpretation of their results and how their work would be published only to have their contract cancelled the next day. In the end keeping quiet probably would have got them at least a first author paper but they ended up with 3rd authorship on their own project.

> A PhD is slave work and exploitation as 'right of passage'. Afterwards, it continues with post-docs. It's all about names and prestige from here on.

I'm sorry this was your experience. My PhD in philosophy was very rewarding, as have been my academic jobs since---with the inevitable ups and downs.

Science and academia are different.

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