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Comment by sdfhdhjdw3 | Hacker News Reader

I'm someone who finished a PhD, here's my perspective.

You don't believe your supervisor or your research group and so you quit, great. It's great that you have the critical thinking abilities and confidence in yourself to make such a decision.

However, I think it's extremely unprofessional to write a blog post saying that your supervisor is superficial or your research group is performative art. I don't say this because I think we should just take the venerable professor's word for it, but because accusations in general, if they're vague enough, are impossible to defend against. I think if there's enough substance to make your comment specific, you should. Maybe even write a paper explaining why what they're doing is nonsense. If you're right, this would genuinely be a contribution to the field.

If you can't be specific enough to be scientific about it, just keep it to yourself.

View on HN

Spent a lot of time in academia, and I quite disagree. He's pointing out something that is very common in academia - common enough to be widely accepted. Saying he is unprofessional in criticizing his supervisors is like saying someone is unprofessional in criticizing his boss for demanding Leetcode style interviews.

If his supervisor were an outlier, I could see your point. But a big purpose behind his blog post is to highlight how common this is.

> Spent a lot of time in academia, and I quite disagree. He's pointing out something that is very common in academia - common enough to be widely accepted. Saying he is unprofessional in criticizing his supervisors is like saying someone is unprofessional in criticizing his boss for demanding Leetcode style interviews.

I specifically said the issue isn't criticizing. The issue is criticizing in a way which is so vague as to be impossible to defend.

It's exhausting commenting on HN. You have to append every minor observation of a laundry list of responses to likely misinterpretations.

The whole purpose of not being specific is to not implicate certain people. This way he can criticize the "whole" industry.

>It's exhausting commenting on HN. You have to append every minor observation of a laundry list of responses to likely misinterpretations.

Interesting seeing this response after you just posted:

>If you can't be specific enough to be scientific about it, just keep it to yourself

Was this a tongue-in-cheek demonstration of your point? Or is vague criticism only unacceptable in academia?

The post I was responding to was the example.

I wanted to claim that you shouldn't make vague criticism. I immediately expected that people would respond as if my claim was that you shouldn't criticize. And sure enough, that's what the post I responded to did.

Me: "You shouldn't make vague criticism"

Response: "OMG you're saying university professors are above criticism."

Do you think I'm being vague here? :-)

You should re-read the response to your post. You are upset because you feel you are not being read, but the problem is that you are not reading others.

It's not exhausting, you're just refusing to understand the other side of the argument.

Criticizing in a vague way is precisely appropriate in a situation where you don't want to make the criticism specific to a single circumstance but are instead trying to make a broader point about a systemic issue.

>It's not exhausting, you're just refusing to understand the other side of the argument.

Do you also accept the "other side" of the argument that the author of the blog post could be wrong?

The grandparent misunderstood why the author was being vague. This is a separate issue from whether the author of the blogpost is right or wrong, it gets very confusing if you try and conflate the two as you are doing right now.

>The grandparent misunderstood why the author was being vague

Perhaps, but only the author can confirm this.

I don't accept either side of the argument as true, my point is simply that telling someone to keep their story to themselves unless they can present an argument that satisfies a scientific standard is missing the point being made. People make arguments that are purposely vague to avoid causing undue harm both to themselves and, believe it or not, to the people they are accusing. Usually you do this because you're not interested in bringing to light the specifics of one particular instance as if this is an isolated case, but rather to let others who may find themselves in a similar circumstance know that they aren't alone.

>telling someone to keep their story to themselves unless they can present an argument that satisfies a scientific standard

I don't see where they made this claim, or a reference to a 'scientific standard'. Can you please point to it?

>If you can't be specific enough to be scientific about it, just keep it to yourself.

I'm in favor of specific criticism rather than lumping everyone together or painting with a broad brush, so on that specific point, I agree with the OP. There is no mention about needing to satisfy any specific 'standard' as you claimed. What you quoted doesn't say that either. Anyway, there isn't much meat in this thread arguing over such minutia, so I will just let you have the last word if you'd like to.

You can be in favor of whatever you want, some people like vanilla, some people like chocolate. The issue is when someone who likes vanilla claims that people who like chocolate are acting unprofessionally and doing something wrong or doing something that is purposeless when all that's really happening is the person who likes vanilla fails to even make an attempt to understand why someone would like chocolate.

Feel free to have whatever preference you want, but understand that others may have different preferences from yours and they may have good reasons for those preferences that you simply are not aware of instead of assuming the worst of them.

>What you quoted doesn't say that either.

It absolutely does and the fact that you don't realize that is a good indication you are not discussing this matter in good faith so I thank you for choosing to cease discussing this any further.

Criticizing in a vague way is a great way to make a broader point if people already agree with you.

If they don't, then it's completely unconvincing because it doesn't actually provide any new information.

So if the goal is to gripe to other people who "get it", then sure, vague criticisms are great.

If the goal is to convince people that something is an issue, then all vague criticisms do is establish what your opinion is; they fail to actually provide information that could (justifiably) convince anyone.

At best, they can convince someone to be interested enough to look into it on their own.

Although its exhausting, one of the things I most appreciate about HN is the willingness of people to sort through those misinterpretations; thank you for doing that.

> I specifically said the issue isn't criticizing.

And my issue wasn't about whether it's OK or not to criticize, nor about the level of detail, but whether his manner of criticism was unprofessional. It was not. You can argue that it's not effective, but there's nothing unprofessional about it.

>He's pointing out something that is very common in academia

And what is that, exactly? That the author is smart and/or right and that everyone around him is wrong? Maybe, but it's not a particularly valuable observation.

> extremely unprofessional

I disagree. It is extremely unprofessional to act like doing research while pocketing mostly public funds like that.

I am 100% behind the author.

They have apparently tried to resolve the issue internally and this serves as good warning for people considering science career in today's world.

>I disagree. It is extremely unprofessional to act like doing research while pocketing mostly public funds like that.

This can be true while it's also true that making a vague, unsubstantiated assertion about how your love for the field is just too deep and pure for academia is still unprofessional.

Of the people who claim they dropped out of school because they were just too smart or creative to go through the motions, the vast majority are probably very wrong. If you want people to take you seriously, make a better argument.

Can you quote research to support your claim?

Alas I only have an anecdote.

I considered starting a PhD around ten years ago. One particular university was having an open day. When I got there everyone was locked out because someone hadn't bothered to tell someone else the open day was happening.

There were visits to the facilities, which were interesting enough but a lot of the tech had been there since the 90s (or 70s in some cases) and there wasn't anything fresh to see.

And there was a show-and-tell by various researchers and one lead professor, during which I realised the professor was a Grade A Bullshitter [1], and the researchers weren't even remotely familiar with other work in the field.

The main person I wanted to see didn't bother to turn up.

Bizarrely, there was a persistently religious undertone - very strange in a field that isn't even remotely religious. (The university is quite well known for its theology department.)

Now, this is a very niche field, so I have no way of knowing if it was typical.

But as experiences go it certainly didn't suggest that that particular department was simmering with eager high-voltage professionalism.

Since then I've read "We're looking for PhD students" notices on various email lists. It's striking how many [2] seem like transparently contrived attempts at getting funding from organisations who already know what exactly they want to fund, and how few have are truly research-driven.

It feels very much like a box ticking exercise. Org gets money, org hands it out to researchers, researchers get students, students write up dissertation, dissertation is forgotten, rinse and repeat.

[1] Subsequently confirmed independently by other people in various "Oh, him - yes, he's a loon" conversations.

[2] Not all. There are places who on the leading edge. But even there some of the research feels dissociated from real problems - almost as if the goal is the production of "Towards..." "Considering..." and "A critique/summary/review/taxonomy of..." of papers, and not so much developing techniques and solutions that that would really move the field forward.

It's a difficult row to hoe.

Some light sometimes needs to be shed (look at Susan Fowler's post on Uber. I think it triggered a fairly necessary reevaluation, or Edward Snowden's revelations), but it is seldom without cost to the person that's holding the flashlight (Snowden is unlikely to receive a warm welcome, if he comes back to the US, and I suspect that Russia won't be a particularly joyful place, in the near future. I have no idea how Susan Fowler has done).

In my own case, my history (quite checkered) has given me some fairly unique views into a lot of terrible behaviors, rotten attitudes, and outright hypocrisy by many folks that like to project a wholesome, professional, image. Now that I'm out of the rat race, I could probably be more specific.

But I won't.

In some, rare, cases, perpetrators went on to cause harm (Not much. I never worked with John Wayne Gacy), but most ended up in rather unenviable places.

In a number of other cases, however, people ended up changing their behavior/attitude, and going on to be happier, healthier people.

For reasons that I won't go into here, I believe in second chances. I was given first-, second-, and third chances.

It has less to do with "professionalism," and more to do with being human. It's not my job to clean up the world (just the bits around me), and I need to pick my battles carefully, so I can do the most good.

Exactly. Giving the OP the benefit of the doubt -- that he is completely correct in his assessment of the group -- he is certainly doing himself no favors publicly throwing them under the bus. I imagine other prospective advisors, in any field, might be reluctant to take him on if this is a pontential outcome.

This can go both ways. While he may be hurt by this, light needs to be shed on systemic failure.

I know a few people who have PhD's that had fantastic support, counselors and teachers, and they still had questions on the validity of their degrees and processes. Here, this person's experience seems to be a money grab by a school unqualified to provide him a PhD in his area.

Going public though, maybe a hard decision, and may hurt him, but who knows? Maybe there are people out there that want someone that is willing to stand up like this publicly?

This seems like the most important point. Is it normal for research groups to take on PhD candidates who they are unable to support in the field of interest?

{Takes on Quantum Computing grad student} + {has insufficient Quantum Computing expertise in group to even advise} seems... pretty bad.

PS: And being from a tenured family and having grown up exposed to academia, I'm inclined to take author at their judgement here, given that taking on students in hot topics meshes with how the incentives of grant funding, publishing, and prestige work.

I don't think he's trying to do himself any favors. If anything he's trying to do others a favor by expressing a very common problem within academia.

Academia is full of mechanisms to negatively judge your research work. In fact judgement is pretty much the only constant in the field: every single piece of work you do will be under constant scrutiny, will be torn apart both before and after publication, and your entire (research) value will be harshly judged by outsiders on a more or less constant basis.

The one positive of this environment that when you see someone who has succeeded in publishing a substantial amount, it's safe to presume that their work is not entirely without merit. That's not a 100% guarantee, but it's a good heuristic. A post like this implies that the author's personal judgement is more insightful than a process that I know to be enormously thorough and harsh, and yet it provides only vague assertions and no details on methodology. At the same time it's hard to ignore that the post is written by someone who is (understandably) a bit bitter and probably isn't being entirely objective in their evaluation.

In general it's not my impression that this sort of post produces reliable feedback that outsiders should rely on, and (unless it's very carefully anonymized, which it isn't) it also leaves bitterness in its wake.

>Academia is full of mechanisms to negatively judge your research work.

Fascinating, as I did not find this at all to be the case in general. I imagine in some cases it could be true, but for the most part I found most research in academia to not be of much interest to many people, one way or another. Hardly anyone takes much time to either validate research or to critique it.

I'm glad to hear that you managed to find something to research that caught the attention of many people/mechanisms, even if only to judge it negatively. It must mean you were doing something important, which I think is the exception and not at all the norm.

I suspect from your comment that you're not familiar with the actual experience of R1 academic research. It is a Darwinian process that involves repeatedly submitting papers to highly competitive conferences for peer-review (a typical top-tier conference in computer security averages <20% acceptance rate.) You must do this many times just to get an Assistant Professorship. Then, assuming you publish N papers during grad school, you need to continue publishing maybe N/2 additional papers (or more) per year while also submitting successful grant proposals to organizations like NSF. These proposals are even more competitive (and worse: these organizations also consider your publication history and reputation, not just the merits of the proposal.) If you do this unabated for seven years or so then you might get tenure, which means you'll get to keep jumping those hurdles for another 25 years or so.

Of course you can argue that all this academic competition selects for the wrong thing (that's subjective) but the competition and testing is never-ending. There is a reason that a lot of people leave for industry, simply because it's so much less stressful.

> The one positive of this environment that when you see someone who has succeeded in publishing a substantial amount, it's safe to presume that their work is not entirely without merit. That's not a 100% guarantee, but it's a good heuristic. A post like this implies that the author's personal judgement is more insightful than a process that I know to be enormously thorough and harsh [...]

This has not been my experience. In my own field, I've found that quite a few well-cited peer-reviewed papers have severe flaws that are not difficult to find. I can't call the process "enormously thorough and harsh". I view current academic processes as more of a facade than anything else. Sure, the process probably filters out absolute garbage, but I don't think most people need peer review to recognize the worst quality research.

Complaining about flaws in a few papers is like saying “I found a piece of software with a bug” and then claiming software engineering is a broken field based on those examples. The argument about peer review is not that it’s perfect on any given paper, but that someone who has repeatedly survived a publication competition with a ~20% success rate and then got other serious researchers to cite and build their work is probably not a total piker. Everyone makes a few mistakes and papers, but in the aggregate it is a shockingly hard gauntlet to run, whatever your impressions may be from the sidelines.

> Complaining about flaws in a few papers is like saying “I found a piece of software with a bug” and then claiming software engineering is a broken field based on those examples.

My point wasn't a complaint about a few papers, rather, important papers that presumably have had a lot of eyeballs go over them in addition to being peer reviewed. If those papers have serious flaws, then I think that does say something about the standards in academia broadly.

One reason why I don't work in academia is that too many academics resist the idea that there is a quality problem.

Also: I didn't say that my field was broken or anything like that. It's not optimal, but for the most part it's okay. That has little to do with peer review.

> someone who has repeatedly survived a publication competition with a ~20% success rate and then got other serious researchers to cite and build their work is probably not a total piker

Sure, it's evidence that the work is good, but it's not particularly strong evidence in my view.

> whatever your impressions may be from the sidelines.

If you're implying that I haven't published in a peer-reviewed venue myself, you're mistaken. I've never had a problem publishing. I think that's because I agree more with Gauss: "few, but ripe". Unfortunately "publish or perish" reins supreme in academia, which probably explains why so many people have trouble as they seem to try to produce "least publishable units". Borderline papers like that of course will have trouble.

I think tarring the entire field of scientific research by saying "I claim I found serious flaws in a few unnamed papers" is pretty meaningless. Provide specifics!

Based on conversations I've had with tenured academics like yourself, providing specifics won't convince you. You could simply say that you aren't qualified in my field so you can't evaluate what I've said, or deny that I've identified enough problems. Those are reasonable counters, but they won't be convincing to me either.

The most effective thing I can do is encourage you to find problems in published papers yourself.

Another factor in my reluctance is that explaining each case would take a significant amount of time. (Brandolini's law, basically.) I can point you to places where I already explained problems I've found, for example: https://pubpeer.com/publications/95455FA4147A9CBD5EAA5185D21...

That paper has over 300 forward citations over about 25 years. It was published first in a conference, and later in the top specialized journal in my sub-field. I went through a large fraction of the forward citations and could not find anyone who noticed the major error I point out. And it's not difficult to spot if one does basic spot checks.

Let me understand this: you found an error in a paper published in 1998, over 24 years ago. Based on this finding you were able to publish a critique and partial solution in a more recent conference or journal, which seems like an absolutely first-class scientific outcome. (I can only assume that very few people were relying on this stupid model, since the flaw wasn’t noticed for decades.) And yet despite this reasonably good outcome correcting an ancient and apparently little-studied result, you feel that this error indicts the entire field of scientific research… because people have cited the paper?? (Most likely, given the number of citations, without relying on the model and simply listing it in “previous work” sections.)

You are also unhappy that you can’t get a response from the first author [initially I read their Google scholar as indicating they’d left the field, but they haven’t and that was my mistake reading Google Scholar in Korean.] Meanwhile you have not contacted the third (typically senior and advisory) author, who appears to have publications as of 2022?

Yet even if you do the basic legwork here and contact all the authors, I’m not sure quite what result you want from this? I presume you’d like an acknowledgement that an old paper has errors? You’ve already received that through the acceptance of your own paper. Would an admission by the third author help? Do you demand a retraction of that ancient paper and every single paper that cited it since? And how is this the devastating critique of all science that you seem to think it is?

I'm not sure we're having a productive conversation. Perhaps I've been unclear, but I didn't say this was a "devastating critique of all science". I said that I thought my field was "for the most part [...] okay" and I think that's true for science broadly. My main point is that peer review as currently practiced is not as good at quality control as you seem to believe.

My link was just one example. As I indicated, I don't have time to give more examples, and I didn't expect to convince you. I think few academics are actively looking for errors, so unless you are, you may not notice them as often as I have.

> I can only assume that very few people were relying on this stupid model, since the flaw wasn’t noticed for decades.

There are quite a few papers that directly use the criticized model, from the 90s until recently. It does seem that many people blindly accepted a clearly wrong model. With that being said, the other model in the paper is responsible for most of the citations.

> You are also unhappy that you can’t get a response from the first author [...] I’m not sure quite what result you want from this?

The first author is the senior author here. (The conference paper version does not have the other two authors.) I contacted them because if I'm wrong, I wanted them to tell me how so that I could avoid making a fool of myself in my paper. I don't want their paper to be retracted, though a notice that it has severe errors would be helpful to readers.

> However, I think it's extremely unprofessional to write a blog post saying that your supervisor is superficial or your research group is performative art.

lol. You don't know the weight of crushed aspirations and a two year opportunity cost.

> I don't say this because I think we should just take the venerable professor's word for it, but because accusations in general, if they're vague enough, are impossible to defend against.

again lol. publication game is well know.

> I think if there's enough substance to make your comment specific, you should. Maybe even write a paper explaining why what they're doing is nonsense. If you're right, this would genuinely be a contribution to the field. If you can't be specific enough to be scientific about it, just keep it to yourself.

again lol. this is a very academic answer. Actually, I'm not sure university administrations write a paper on policies and ask for peer comments before making changes. They just do it, in the most brutal, authoritarian/top-down/corporate way possible. But the top brass needs papers from the bottom. Show me how much academia has been optimized by writing papers about academia. Well, even if they did they are useless.

I interact very heavily with academics (though am thankfully no longer one myself) and one thing I can't stand is that all of them will complain endlessly about the horribly abusive and broken system that academia has become, then without hesitation turn around and flog the next person in line when it's their turn to continue the process from the abusing side.

As someone who once held the title of assistant professor, I have little patience for people who recognize that the system is in many ways repulsive, and yet refuse to even consider to stop playing the game because it's all that they know.

The amount of bullshit being produced and regurgitated in academia needs to be called out. Your definition of "unprofessional" is just "this makes us look bad"

Academics who defend a broken system are a major factor in why that system continues to decline.

I'm glad the OP wrote this article and find it expectedly discouraging that someone creeps out from the woodwork to try to shush it.

> Academics who defend a broken system are a major factor in why that system continues to decline.

Much like military & law enforcement personnel who wear their medals defending a broken system.

The OP should count themselves lucky they have seen that having a few letters after their name on a piece of paper or business card doesnt cut it with many.

Estate agents (realtors) have devalued the letters after name's obedience to "authority".

I mostly agree, but I actually think the biggest pressure is people afraid of getting kicked out.

You pay your weight in gold, but if you become a pain to someone high enough on the totem pole, it's easy to get kicked out of a program, leaving you with not much.

You gotta play the game to have any chance of changing things. A lot like politics, actually.

> I interact very heavily with academics (though am thankfully no longer one myself) and one thing I can't stand is that all of them will complain endlessly about the horribly abusive and broken system that academia has become, then without hesitation turn around and flog the next person in line when it's their turn to continue the process from the abusing side.

Completely agree.

> The amount of bullshit being produced and regurgitated in academia needs to be called out. Your definition of "unprofessional" is just "this makes us look bad"

No, it isn't. First off, I'm not in the academia. I'm not part of the "us". It doesn't affect me if person A is attacking people B. For me I don't care at all. Also, I specifically said that the problem wasn't criticism. The problem is criticism so vague it's impossible to defend, because there's nothing to address. Person A says that person B is superficial. Person B responds "no I'm not". Very substantive!

The HN crowd generally hates academia with a passion and will welcome any criticism of it, regardless of how vague it is.

The HN crowd hates bullshit, which is different.

Well yeah, everyone thinks they hate bullshit. That doesn't mean they're good at identifying it.

"I'm someone who finished a PhD" doesn't help your claims.

But I digress. The real question is, why do personal opinions like "xxx is superficial" needs to be defendable? Is academia somehow a "protected class" of individuals where we need to keep our opinions to ourselves unless we have hard evidence?

Or is this a standard you hold against other PhDs? Because the OP stated they quit, so it doesn't really apply.

I can totally empathize with the GP's claim that 'Your definition of "unprofessional" is just "this makes us look bad"'. You might not be in academia per se, but it seems to me like you picked up that mode of thinking nonetheless.

And no, I didn't keep my opinions to myself despite I have no proof whatsoever. Sue me for unprofessionalism please.

> The amount of bullshit being produced and regurgitated in academia needs to be called out. Your definition of "unprofessional" is just "this makes us look bad"

This can be generalized, I think. Professional social standards, specifically, do seem to primarily be about protecting and saving face.

I'd be interested in hearing your perspective on what's broken, why, and what avenues are available to fix it. (Genuinely curious, I know the tone of that sentence may come across as dismissive. It wasn't intended to.)

Academia is no more motivated by a honest interest to understand things around us, raise questions and spend time deeply thinking and genuinely coming up with solutions that really make sense and bring change to the world.

A lot of researchers are very mediocre and they treat research as a simple career where they superficially advise a bunch of PhD students. A lot of those researchers neither think nor raise questions nor make meaningful contributions.

Exacerbated by research grants which favours researcher with lots of publications regardless of the quality of the research (usually real honest high quality research takes time and produces much fewer papers). Those researchers thus end up chasing low hanging fruit just to increase their paper count, making everything they do shallow and full of bullshit.

Okay that's your problem with the system, but how would you propose to fix it? That's the important part. And be careful in your proposal that you don't end up reinventing the current system (but worse), because lots of proposals I've seen tend to go that way (coming from a place that doesn't actually understand the system they purportedly want to fix).

To be honest, I have no idea how to fix this. This was just an insider observation. Luckily, I am doing a PhD on systems software and I have a large support network of very smart people on the Internet in the form of contributors to large open source projects such as the Linux kernel, GCC and LLVM. My supervisor is the shallow-type of researcher, but because of my special circumstances, it's easier for me to overcome the issue. However, it may not be that easy for other people working on exotic topics such as Quantum Computing.

This is a harsh reply.

I also had the same issue as the author: absent supervisions. I had only two meetings during my phd and they never reviewed my papers (I tried everything to motivate them and I finally gave up). I did everything on my own. It was very hard. I learned the hard way (try and fail... do it again...). I finally finished my phd with great appreciations from the jury. However this ends with a considerable cost: I am completely broken. I now suffer of a severe depression and generalized anxiety disorders. I take several medications and this does not help so much. I lost a lot of friends. My life is basically a journey in hell since several years now.

> I had only two meetings during my phd and they never reviewed my papers

This sounds unreal. How did your supervisor managed his subordinates so they wound not spend their time in leisure activities?

> However this ends with a considerable cost

I can relate to that. Broken aspirations, depleted ambition and energy and lack of interpersonal relationships sometimes make me feel sad.

> This sounds unreal. How did your supervisor managed his subordinates so they wound not spend their time in leisure activities?

Self-pressure? I cannot spend my work time in leisure time, otherwise I ashame. It is pretty even the opposite that I experienced: I felt ashame in my leisure time to not work to get more progress on my phd.

We were only two phd students supervised by the same pair of supervisors. In fact we saw our supervisors a lot. However this was more in a friend way. Every time we switch to work-related discussions they found excuses to leave or just say that they will take some time later to ask our questions / reveiw our drafts (and this never happen).

In the case of the other student, he was more lucky and find an unofficial supervisor that help him a lot. I find some support from another researcher at the end of my phd. And thanks to him I had some review of my manuscript. This gave me some confidence to finish the writing.

Yeah, I have seen many of my colleagues to feel ashamed to take all vacation time (around 28 workdays in a year) to go home or on vacation. It sometimes felt like unarticulated competition who takes less. Perhaps, it can explained by insecurity that your name is going to be taken off the paper you are coauthoring with others.

I guess in your situation the supervisors were present in taking care of your self motivation and checking your commitment to your PhD when having informal conversations. Also, it sounds you were in control of your PhD project and could set up goals and strategy achieving them yourself.

I am curios, in what field did you do your PhD?

> How did your supervisor managed his subordinates so they wound not spend their time in leisure activities?

They are not there to babysit, and many want self motivated people. If you spend your time doing leisure activities, you will either spend too much time getting the PhD, or simply not get it.

Also, in large enough research groups, the advisor delegates almost everything to postdocs. I knew one guy who, every time he met his advisor, would have to answer the question "So what was your thesis topic again?"

This seems very much US and academic field specific. Here in Europe when I did my PhD in physics the supervisor is the boss designing the project and giving out orders on tasks to be accomplished. As somewhere in this thread one mentioned it is a true apprenticeship.

It is though very much opposite of what new PhDs expects judging that from my own experience, conversations and confronting my supervisor who eventually frankly said that “academic freedom is not for PhDs”. This created an environment which reinforced itself.

This made me look PhD as a job which I tried to treat as such looking through cost/benefit lense. Probably, if my supervisor would not keep up with regular meetings I would have done less (after being introduced with concept of “academic freedom” for PhDs).

I would not look in that as lack of self motivation. In contrary at the beginning many PhDs were quite curios on what they do and what happens around them. But by the end of it many my colleagues went away from academia to work it in finance because it pays and frankly many have said that PhD is just a job. Thus I would assert that self motivation does not make PhD thesis alone unless if someone cares about it.

> This seems very much US and academic field specific. Here in Europe when I did my PhD in physics the supervisor is the boss designing the project and giving out orders on tasks to be accomplished.

Many (most?) professors in the US are the same. The other kind, though, is not that rare.

I also have a PhD.

There's a major asymmetry in US academia that public accusations can address, if done tactfully, truthfully, and specifically enough to allow a defense.

In US academia, subordinates need positive references to get jobs. That leads many to be quite deferential to their supervisors, even allowing abuse. Nominally this is supposed to highlight strengths and weaknesses of a job candidate, but it also can serve to warn potential employers away from a particular job candidate.

However, in contrast, there is no formal mechanism to warn others about bad supervisors. Given that, I am okay with tactfully, truthfully, and specifically going public about negative experiences with academic supervisors.

To be clear: I don't advocate defamation. Keep good records, and if you choose the go public, be tactful and stick to what can be easily corroborated.

Also: My experience is that subordinates are rarely given the opportunity to reply to defamatory claims made by academic supervisors when providing references. So if your focus is on the ability of someone to defend against defamation, I don't think you can defend the status quo.

In general, I tend to be of the school that, while I won't say you should never blow up bridges with great force, the default should almost always be that whatever satisfaction is gained by publishing a cathartic blog post or twitter thread is probably better written in a diary somewhere without pushing a publish button.

Blogs need a "emotion-meter" metric that auto-delays publication for a set time. Probably true for every communication method in existence.

I think you're right that it could be a bit more tactful. It's also not surprising to me that the person who finished advocates a "go along to get along" and "don't rock the boat" attitude.

The original text says performative act, and not performative art. Not a big deal perhaps but this subtle difference carries a different connotation for me, I wonder if you might get a different impression if you read it again.

You finished a PhD, you should know how much weight his accusations would be given seeing as he isn’t a professor. I kept my mouth shut when I heard my co-advisor was badmouthing my other co-advisor’s research and the result was the committee blowing up at the prospectus. Sometimes it pays to be proactive.

> If you can't be specific enough to be scientific about it, just keep it to yourself.

This is some serious gatekeeping. A PhD student is an apprentice, on a path to get scientific training. They are not yet trained enough, so that you could reasonable expect them to "be scientific" to a level of rigorous standards.

This is terrible advice (also from a smurf account).

Yes unsubstantiated claims can be harmful, but that doesn’t mean that no such claims should ever be made. The author is not just bad mouthing their research group, but presenting their perspective of what took place.

> presenting their perspective of what took place.

I know this is the age of oversharing, but just because something is from a perspective doesn't mean that people should be interested in it, or that is wise or fair to share. Making it specific and detailed is a way to make it fairer and more productive.

edit: also, to appeal to self-interest, people respond to detailed argument with attacks on the supports of that argument. People respond to vague accusations with ad hominem (which may be very specific) because there's no argument to attack. Vague accusations are almost always eventually more damaging to the accuser than to the accused.

I don't like saying "in the old days" much, and I wasn't able to read the article, but this seemed like something you'd rant to a friend or two over a beer instead of to the general public.

That doesn't mean brushing it off though. More of a vent to cool yourself off before taking the next action. At least that's what I've always done.

At least you can somewhat "un-say" things now a days if you control the content hosting.

This post isn't about the advisors. No one reading this knows who the advisors are, they won't show up in Google. "Saying that your supervisor is superficial or your research group is performative art" is also hardly an accusation, it's an opinion. No names are named: how can there be an accusation without an accused?

At a quick glance the author appears to be anonymous and doesn't name anyone.

The author's "About" page links to both their GitHub profile (full name, partial photo), and that in turn links to a more complete profile listing their location, current employer, previous employers + education, etc.

Not at all anonymous. :/

His accusations in the web archive snapshot that I pulled are ... quite mild, concrete and specific enough: Nobody to talk about in the university about your projects or topics. First PhD student. No postdoc working on the same topic. Advisors who suggest to do a thesis on something else, less difficult or familiar ... and the project seems to be less and less about the hot buzzword in the advertisement or grant proposal.

This is spots on description of what happens if you waltz into some university department or research group intending to "do a PhD" in something that isn't the core competency your group. This is very common in "provincial universities" but also happens to lesser in top schools if you just happen to come in with expectations that are misaligned with the reality. It is a side product of the sad aspect of academic reality that finding funding for a PhD student is often much easier than finding funding for a post-doc or more senior member, even though that is exactly the wrong way to build a good research group.

Philip Guo's the PhD Grind describes many of the same challenges.

I also share a memory of older member of the faculty suggesting that your PhD is supposed to a formality to endure. "A driving license", not real real research with your own ideas. It was very depressing thing to hear, because I too went in with an attitude of "I shall study a question I was interested in my undergrad, but seriously this time".

While you’re not wrong, in the sense that this wouldn’t hold up as a piece of journalism, anyone who’s been in academia will read it differently: this is an emotional, honest account of a problem common enough that even if this one case were not true, we know it is all too plausible.

I feel for this student. Both for what they’ve gone through, and also how this moment of catharsis has probably also caused additional strife for them in all the attention it’s seen. Honestly, I feel for the professor and the rest of the research group too, and all the perverse incentives that have lead otherwise smart people down these unfortunate paths.

> I don't say this because I think we should just take the venerable professor's word for it, but because accusations in general, if they're vague enough, are impossible to defend against.

I have my doubts on this, because widespread use of sealed recommendation letters already make blackballing/indefensible accusations sort of the norm in academia, but in this case biased against students. When a student gets the courage to complain in the open, I tend to see it as making the playing field more even.

I think a Glassdoor-like site, but for academic advisors and research groups would be quite popular.

It's also likely that, as a new student, the writer simply doesn't understand these "performative" aspects yet. The research group isn't succeeding by accident, put it that way.

> accusations in general, if they're vague enough, are impossible to defend against

General accusations are easy to defend against, you just ask for specifics.

> If you can't be specific enough to be scientific about it, just keep it to yourself.

It's a blog post, he definitely can say what he thinks, orthogonal to unprofessionality.

It's up to the reader to understand that's his view of reality and without any hard proof we should take his view as a data point, and potentially an erroneous one. Nothing more.

Last we need is people writing accusatory white papers to explain themselves over an opinion they had on a personal blog post.

Edit: removed to follow rules

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Do you think his chances would be better in academia if he:

1. Writes a vague blog post about his dissatisfaction with his PhD

2. Writes a paper attacking his supervisor explicitly

Obviously the 3rd option ("shut the fuck up if you don't want your overlords to hear") would be the best, but also perhaps the most boring.

> Obviously the 3rd option ("shut the fuck up if you don't want your overlords to hear") would be the best, but also perhaps the most boring

Best for whom?

Best for the blog post author. Picking fights with people stronger than you, in a system you don't intend to leave, doesn't usually work out well for you. Nor in general. STFUing is a near-optimal strategy in a lot of situations, really.

Locally (as in, local maxima) I would agree. I can’t think of any whistle-blower who didn’t suffer major blowback, unless they remained anonymous.

However it also leads to a tragedy of commons, in this case in the form of institutional corruption.

Can't say I agree or disagree since article is gone but it does make me very curious how it was written to prompt your comment. Disparaging (the article I mean, not you) can take you down some bad paths with your career and academia.

> If you can't be specific enough to be scientific about it, just keep it to yourself

Why?

What you're doing right now is telling other people how to live their lives. Is that ok, or should you be scientific about it, or keep it to yourself?

They do justify why they believe what they are saying.

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