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Comment by muaytimbo | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised it took them so long to get fed up, reaching the mid-career level. I realized doing my PhD that all of academia is a toxic house of cards built on cheap grad student labor, foreign student tuition and grant beggary, and the false promise to students of at least an interesting (if not particularly well-paid) career. If it took you until mid-career to realize this . . . you weren't observant and I don't really feel that sorry that you were asleep for so long.

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A bit over-egged, but there is not denying there are a raft of problems in academia.

On the other hand, observant or not, it's still (nearly ) the only game in town for some sorts of things that people want to do. Some people pursue that for a long time hoping things will shake out ok for them... as it does very much for some.

Some of these things can be done by anyone yet academia gatekeeps the academic creds for itself. E.g. anyone can do machine learning research, but you can't publish in a journal without being affiliated to a university

That’s not true at all. Papers come from industry all the time. I know of independent researchers who make up an LLC name and use that as their affiliation.

Most people who publish in journals are affiliated with academia simply because that’s where the vast majority of basic research happens.

I've published a couple of papers in decent pure math journals with no affiliation at all. It didn't cause any issues.

I studied medieval history. It was common in the 2000s for significant work to be done by “unaffiliated scholars.”

Start your own journal? It doesn't necessarily matter that citations to it won't be tracked in Scopus or whatever when it's first launched. Even the gatekept academic journals aren't automatically accepted into citation databases and academic search engines, it usually takes several years after they're launched to be fully accepted. Or discard the journal framework entirely—as long as people who are interested in the work can find the work, it's fine.

Edit: One of the most important papers in fracture mechanics was published in a campus newsletter. The publication venue doesn't matter that much.

yeah machine learning was not the best example because it does not depend on journal prestige, but pretty much everything else is

the publication venue matters very much in most fields. it is rare exception when something is published elsewhere. the bulk of papers need to make it to goodish journals to be ever seen and considered when deciding about funding. Open access misses the target because it only replaces the publishing part, not the prestige part.

Are you a late career researcher by chance? Your comments feel like how things used to be done. I think the most important thing to getting your paper read now (other than being in a nature level journal) is being indexed on google scholar.

> One of the most important papers in fracture mechanics was published in a campus newsletter. The publication venue doesn't matter that much.

I’d be very interested in a link, that sounds cool!

One of the more important contributions in grain growth theory (crystalline materials, not food) is a short comment by John von Neumann, where I guess he attended a conference talk and just came up with this elegant topological theory right there.

https://u.math.biu.ac.il/~lazarem/von_Neumann_paper.pdf

> I’d be very interested in a link, that sounds cool!

Paris' Law, which predicts fatigue crack growth rate, was published in "The Trend in Engineering", which is the University of Washington College of Engineering alumni newsletter.

“Though Paris’s ideas presented a way to quantify and predict structural integrity, his approach was considered unconventional, and none of the leading journals published it. So, in January 1961, after leaving the UW to return to Lehigh for his Ph.D., Paris published his paper, ‘A Rational Analytic Theory of Fatigue,’ in The Trend.”

https://www.engr.washington.edu/news/article/2021-05-24/pari...

https://www.engr.washington.edu/news/trend

I have multiple papers and none of them have university affiliations. The publishers are more than happy to take basically anyones money to just post your pdf online.

> you can't publish in a journal without being affiliated to a university

this is not true.

Yep! I was warned almost immediately and had good supervisors. It doesn’t change the fact that academia is built on wage theft, precious contracts and volatile sources of income. Don’t even get me started on the middle manager bullshit.

>cheap grad student labor, foreign student tuition and grant beggary, and the false promise to students

Don't forget about those sweet, sweet tax-free endowment investment gains.

Yeah, I realized before finishing my PhD that academia was a Ponzi scheme and I was one of the bag holders at the end. Tenure track positions haven’t been growing for many years now, yet degrees are being awarded at far higher than replacement rate. TBH, I should have realized it was a list cause when I found out doing 3 postdocs wasn’t an unusual situation.

It’s not that they weren’t paying attention. It’s more that academics egos can’t handle the loss to their identity of not being an academic anymore.

That's not entirely the individual's fault. With many (or most) academic fields, leaving academia for industry is seen as failing, and leaving the institution means leaving the network.

This is very true. The only way I coped with it was by basically just cutting off any contact I had with people in my former field, with the exception of a couple of friends. Or at least, I like to think that I cut off contact. A more realistic assessment is that I simply ceased to exist to most of those people as soon as I left the field.

I did the same thing. It wasn’t conscious, it was more that they lived in a completely different world from where I went. We couldn’t really relate as much anymore. Like we now had very different approaches to life. Academy moves so slow. When I check up on people I’m just shocked at how little has changed with them.

Caring about something like this is all about ego, though. What good is this network if you're stuck?

It’s definitely partially academia that does this. When you are a grad student you are paid so poorly and worked so hard it is difficult to build a substantial identity outside of being an academic. Academia is good at marketing itself as a noble cause that imbues very high status if you can ever “make it” so quiting is giving up on that lofty dream. Where in industry it is definitely “not cool” if you build your identity around your job. That creates a helpful firewall that pushes people to develop something outside their work.

Not sure why you're being downvoted for this. When I was doing my PhD, I definitely noticed that the primary aim of research was not to produce something of benefit to mankind, but to produce esoteric silos for academics to protect their egos in.

The politics were petty and vicious, and the number one rule there was to maintain the "face" of the people above you.

Its unfortunate that those groups exist. But there are many who genuinely want to discover and share knowledge and know how. Research is a slog and it’s hard to quantify how some seemingly esoteric research could benefit humanity.

>But there are many who genuinely want to discover and share knowledge and know how. Research is a slog and it’s hard to quantify how some seemingly esoteric research could benefit humanity.

I understand that "mooshot" research exists, and why it sometimes has to be that way. It's just that the entire process of academia seems to be almost designed to crush any curiosity and redirect mankind's brainpower to validating particular ideas that incumbent scientists base their ego on.

My comment maybe came off as a criticism for academics but I was speaking from experience with my own struggle disentangling my ego from academia. I still wanted to think of myself as a physicist and it handicapped my career progress and made me unhappy. Letting go of that was key.

>If it took you until mid-career to realize this . . . you weren't observant and I don't really feel that sorry that you were asleep for so long.

Well the same can said of many devs who orgasmate on the next JS tool/framework.

Oh well, the whole premise of life seems to be built on some giant false promises. After life (truth=death is a dead end) , god ( truth=nobody around), meaning of life (truth=42), career( truth= sorry job), democracy( truth=refined oligarchy) lol, got to stop somewhere.

That, or you were fortunate enough to matriculate into a program at a world-class research university with adequate support and funding, where your peers have graduated and gotten their desired next positions, and where you felt you were learning and gaining valuable skills? Sure, not everything is great all of the time, but not all PhD experiences are like you describe either.

I went to a world class research University (an Ivy, top 15 in my field). The environment is still toxic, pay is low, and still very few got the professorships they sought.

Where is this mystical world you describe? Are you tenured/tenure track faculty at a major university?

I have a wide range for friends all from top tier universities, none of them had the experience you're describing. Today coming from a top tier program at a place like Harvard, MIT, Cornell or Yale means you have a shot at landing a tenure gig at a mid to top tier university, but it sill requires a long run of post-doc wandering. The environments are still toxic, and the majority still end up fleeing to other careers to make a living.

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