A mental health crisis in science

Early in my career, I considered (with an MS in Electrical Engineering, but with 4 years of professional programming experience) a switch into law. Big firms hire (or did in the past) people with tech degrees to do patent work and will pay a salary plus pay for law school.

When I joined the big firm, there were about 25 people in my role. I was the only with with an EE or CS degree/background, the only one without a PhD, and the only one with actual post-academic work experience. For me, it was a 10% pay cut before accounting for law school tuition, similar benefits, and an small increase in hours. For all of the PhDs, it was essentially a 100% raise, substantially less work, and superior benefits.

And ofcourse the Titans of social media - zuckerberg, chamath, tiktok and 1000s of engineers, PMs will not pay for the harm their engineered products have caused because waters have been muddied enough and no true accounting of the harm can happen.

It is kind of like inventing a new synthetic highly addictive drug which is technically legal but very harmful and you can sell it to everyone.

There are a handful of academics who are truly built for working in academia and wouldn't be as successful in "the industry" but at least half could transition out of academia and clean-up with a normal office job.

1) Have an entirely separate life outside of academia. Do not mix the two, maintain a strict separation, and keep all academic relationships strictly professional.

2) Don't think of your advisor as anything other than an employer. They're not a father figure or a mentor or anything like that. You're just cheap labor, and don't forget it.

3) Don't think of you university as a 'place of learning and research' - they've all been corporatized to the hilt, and are basically run on the same lines as any business entity, including the worst aspects of corporate HR.

4) If you do have mental health issues, absolutely never go to anyone like a university-affiliated therapist, etc. If you ever have a dispute with the university, they'll use any such interaction in an effort to discredit you.

5) Fraudulent manipulation of data is more common than not as is dishonest behavior by PIs, and if your data from your own research doesn't agree with their past work, they'll try to prevent it from getting published and otherwise sabotage your progress, so expect that.

6) Academic politics is among the nastiest that exists, and enemies of your PI will also happily sabotage your progress just to make your PI look bad. Even other grad students might try something like this, so trust noone (and see #1).

7) If you have any really brilliant ideas with commercial potential, don't say a word about it to anyone, don't write it down, because the university will claim that it owns all your IP and will demand a percentage of anything you do with it, so keep quiet until you've left the system.

You can learn a lot if you get into the right situation, however. Careful vetting of any prospective research group is important in that respect.

Self-awareness is good but less impressive when they're still charging universities obscene amounts to access material the journal obtained basically for free.

(He says as he writes his thesis and prepares to start his postdoc.)

I'm frankly tired of science being characterized in terms of competitiveness and abuse. That's true, but it's deeper than that. It is now structurally corrupt, in the sense that nominal credit does not reflect actual contributions and results are often questionable or even fraudulent, and the incentives are structured to reward collecting new data that are very predictable rather than new ideas or exploring unknowns.

The characterization of science as just being "stressful" or "competitive", as opposed to being broken and corrupt, does disservice and deflects from real change by implicitly putting the responsibility on those who are affected the most.

It's as if you had a city full of crime, white collar as well as otherwise, and then discussed the problems in terms of victims being anxious, rather than the fact there's no police in the the city and the court system is corrupt.

Rather, it was very basic stuff, like being told to come in at 5:30AM to feed a cell line only to have the PI show up at 2PM, throw the experiment in the garbage, threaten the student's livelihood, and then demand they stay until 11:30PM redoing the experiment. Over and over again, at random intervals.

I asked around about this stuff because a family member now works in the field and had some startling experiences, only to find that this is apparently almost universal, and that what I'm describing is on the lighter end of it. There are stories about labs at elite universities where the grad students have set up secluded spaces to go hide from their PIs and cry. It's everything you've heard about working as a developer at a video game company, dialed up to 11.

E.g. there’s increasingly an expectation that students should come into a PhD program with one or more publications already under their belt. For top programs ideally these should be first author (not yet an absolute requirement but it’s more important each year).

So you better get a good research assistant job as an undergrad so you can do that. It has to be early enough in undergrad that you have time to get the paper out before applying to grad school. So you need to be prepared to get a professor to work with you freshman/sophomore year…

So you have to have evidence of skills basically coming in to undergrad. Either be really brilliant and stand out in class, or, better, have some experience in high school to make you credible…

These pressures would only increase with fewer PhD slots. Maybe that’s fine long term but it does have a distorting effect on people’s lives if you have to make high stakes decisions that early.

Academia isn't the only career path for those with a PhD (I worked in industry and at NASA as well), and I think students should be taught that early on. I think we deny the opportunity to learn how to conduct research to too many people due to limited resources.

Regarding student aptitude, that's hard to measure. Already we highly prioritize students who have already published as undergraduates. If we do more to ensure student aptitude, it would hurt those who may excel but were held back by a lack of mentorship during their undergraduates in how to get into a PhD program. This would also negatively impact efforts to increase diversity in science as well.

The problem is the gatekeepers such as journal corps profit from the artificial scarcity they create. There's no reason for them to only publish a certain number of "papers" in the paperless world.

The problem is you also see this behavior in well established lab, where the PI has very little to lose if he quits research altogether.

In my experience, the correlation with whether the professor was an assistant professor seeking tenure vs a well established full professor and the amount of work they make PhD students do is almost nil. It's mostly purely driven by the will of the PI, not the demands of the funding situation. A lot of professors choose to have few graduate students so they don't have to stress too much about funding.

Remember: Once you get tenure, your job is not at risk if your research output is low (although it does affect compensation). If you get a $1M grant and end up with no research papers out of it, there is no accountability - except the granting agency will deprioritize you in the future (if even that).

If you're seeking an advisor, ask his/her current students what life is like. Also find people who graduated under him/her and ask them.

The part that doesn't fit is their PIs being continuously abusive, or, worse, destructive: the PI's goals are ostensibly those of a supposed startup founder, to drive a team to the redline to get something delivered in an unreasonably short period of time, fair enough. But PIs deliberately fuck things up, disrupt experiments, chase team members out of the lab for no apparent reason, berate team members to the point where they can't be productive.

The culture is much more reminiscent of a 1980s fine dining restaurant kitchen than of a startup. The chef paid his dues, and if having a pot half-filled with hot stock thrown at his head was something he had to deal with, by god, so will his line cooks and stages.

Academic jobs are nothing like that.

Social media is a big part of it, but from what I’ve seen it’s not in the way people usually describe it. The most unhappy people I see aren’t the ones talking to their friends on Instagram and Facebook during their lunch break. To be honest, those people seem to be thriving socially simply by virtue of keeping up with their friends and coordinating social activities.

The most unhappy people I see are the ones consuming hours of Reddit and Twitter every day. They have a never ending stream of ragebait, outrage headlines, tragedy stories, and world-is-ending stories filling their feeds. They’re also filled with unreasonable expectations about the workplace.

In recent years multiple juniors have confidently told me that “nobody can do more than about 2 hours of work per day”, citing Reddit or Twitter threads that explain it. Then they get into a real job that requires a full day of work and feel like they’re being taken advantage of. I’ve had a concerning number of conversations with juniors who are getting paid $120K or more to do entry level work with great mentoring at a local company, only to be outraged at some idea that the industry is taking advantage of them because they haven’t been promoted to senior with $300K total comp after their first year. The source of these expectations is always some form of social media (Reddit, Blind, Twitter)

I don’t know how this translates to academic contexts because that’s not my mentoring domain. I imagine it’s at least contributing, though. That said, academic environments are known to be grueling so it’s not entirely a singular issue. They really are grueling.

While Twenge wanted to talk about both things (and I'm somewhat suspicious of the certainty of her conclusions), I found it pretty thought-provoking to focus on the drop in in-person social interaction as the driver. Social media use can quite likely lead to lower in-person socialization (I do think it's likely causation, and in that direction). And there may be other social factors doing such too. Covid obviously. (note that rise in teen depression trend started well before covid though). Over-protectiveness (for teens) or general fear of risk of "the world"/focus on risk reduction. (They talked about this a bit).

To me it seems pretty clear (just my intuition/perception, not from actual social science) that our society is having a crisis of lack of meaningful relationships/community and lack of feeling of purpose in one's life, and this is leading to depression and anxiety. (As well as possible political disaster). What exactly is causing that lack of meaninful relationships and purpose, and what can be done, is harder. I think the internet is a (large) part of it, but so are other parts of the social/political/economic system.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

Overall, it’s difficult to have much hope for the future. We’re in a new cold war where collaboration decreases rapidly between the West and, I guess, East. That’s wildly different than 2008 when China and Russia appeared to warm up to the West and taking some more democratic stances.

What does excite me is the continued improvements in hardware and software. Let’s hope those things will continue improvements in entertainment, medicine, travel, and education.

Imagine growing up that way and then being sent off on your own. Of course your mental well-being will plummet. It's like being in a nice climate controlled house for 18 years and then being thrown out in the wilderness. When your expectation is to never have to deal with any discomfort.... well it's a shock.

As far as the social media part, I think many of these kids were raised on smart devices. They were receiving constant dopamine hits from a young age and no parenting on emotional regulation. If your brain is wired for an easy dopamine hit that doesn't require work, the real world is pretty harsh and depressing.

It’s being mocked over the environment. All they get is tough love as a generation dies off leaving behind the worst ecological mess any dying generation has left behind.

It’s being swindled by one socialized loss to enable private gain after another; sports stadiums, healthcare… etc

It’s teen women watching bodily autonomy taken from them by a bunch of leches.

And, the worst part, it’s the apathetic public following orders. Feckless society afflicted by learned helplessness; all the white collar workers who can’t provide anything real for themselves. Imagine being on the hook to coddle that?

This culture is a joke of self absorbed primates who ramble in high minded praise of their intelligence. War is peace and exploitation by aristocrats is freedom.

The days of providing new products to the eager market are gone. It simply no longer pays to hire more people and let them solve other people's problems. It's an all-out class war (fighting against unions, bribing politicians, colluding to suppress wage growth and so on) with capitalists infighting about who gets how large share of the emerging rent economy (communications, housing, transportation, food).

Instead of the victims or the culture, I'd rather look at the systemic issues that scientific institutions struggle with: debt, lack of social mobility, being underpaid and overworked, etc.

Continent.

So maybe it is only partly about exploitation, but also about applying a social filter.

I've also been told this is a prime driver for gender disparity in STEM academia: the women with the talent to succeed in a Ph. D. instead go earn their MD.