The flight of the Weird Nerd from academia | Hacker News Reader

The flight of the Weird Nerd from academia

writingruxandrabio.com

49 pointsapwheele35 comments

As a mid-90s Westinghouse winner weird nerd who never ended up in academia because of a desire to be left alone to do my research thing this hits hard:

"Biology Professor Jason Sheltzer has an interesting thread today that points in this direction. Through an ad hoc analysis, Jason discovered that while 66% of the top national winners at the Intel/Westinghouse Science Fair from 1990 to 2002 pursued careers in academia, this number dropped to less than a third for winners from 2003 to 2014. Now, for this to support my and Nate’s observations, you have to assume the Science Fair winners are good representations of the Weird Nerd. I personally think that’s a valid assumption! If you scroll down in his thread, you will see indeed some illustrious names of current academics among these winners. I’ll add to this list recent Nobel Laureate Katalin Kariko, who describes in her book having scored 3rd in her country in the Biology Olympiad. This is the closest thing Eastern European countries have to a Science Fair."

* Finalist but not top 10 which is what the data here was about.

> If you scroll down in his thread, you will see indeed some illustrious names of current academics among these winners. I’ll add to this list recent Nobel Laureate Katalin Kariko

It should be noted here that she was denied tenure at Penn for the same research that eventually won her the Nobel Prize.

Anecdotal? Sure. But still supportive of the idea that there is something very, very wrong with modern academia.

I’m not convinced by this proposed dichotomy: I know plenty of “Weird Nerd”-type academics who are also ruthless bureaucrats, proficient in leveraging their Boy Genius status to bully, belittle, and generally undermine the academic system whenever it doesn’t directly advance their interests.

Just about every I know with a higher STEM degree has a personal story about one of these types. A professional administrator with no interest in “real” academia is its own kind of ill, but it’s not clear to me that things were all that rosy to begin with.

Is that the cause of nerd flight, the symptom of it, or the direct consequence, do you think?

I think it's a significant cause; I don't know if it's also a symptom.

I know a lot of bright, sensitive, promising people who have been effectively bullied out of the academic system because their promise was a threat to a more established person's ego (sometimes the person responsible, on paper, for developing the next generation of academics).

That has not been my experience, I'm sure it happens all the time though. I'm sorry it does

The people who are the best at bullying will win in that system, and that typically aren't the weird nerds. Nerds can bully people, but such systems tend to filter those out in the long run in favor of more socially skilled people who are much better at bullying.

Note that the worst bullies tend to be very popular people, popular bullies are harder to deal with since everyone will side with them.

My experience is that nerds are perfectly capable of bullying other nerds. Or, more accurately: nerds are able to convince Nerd Group A that their contributions, merit, etc. are worth whatever deleterious side effects Nerd Group B feels. This is not the case for non-nerds, who aren't liked by either group.

(I think this entire framing is misguided: nerdiness is a marginally meaningful social category, and there are plenty of academic departments that are toxic without a single "non-nerd" being present.)

That has nothing to do with this discussion, I don't think that non nerds are more toxic, they are just better at it. My point is that when we emphasize social games and popularity contests then nerds tend to lose more than before, so non-nerds bubble up in the hierarchies, changing the makeup of the organizations.

This has been written about in various ways in the academic and surrounding literature for awhile now. I'm not sure the language it uses does itself any favors but it does point to some interesting recent discussion and research.

A lot of it is a stick as well as carrot problem; a lot of the incentive structures are basically pushing and rewarding management and administrative — as well as salesmanship — behavior rather than research per se. If you want to do research, you're going to find modern academics increasingly distasteful. If there are alternative career paths for you, it's just another thing pulling you in a different direction.

The article gets into this with the discussion of the converse — the entry of failed corporatists, which is an interesting twist — but I'm not sure the exit of certain content-focused individuals per se is really the original cause. It might create a vicious circle or feedback loop but I think there's origins and sustaining factors elsewhere.

I suspect this comment under TFA is closer to what’s going on: “My sense is that winning Westinghouse has slanted substantially toward the types who just want to overachieve and go to Harvard relative to the types who are weird nerds even apart from any differences between subjects.” Access to the professional mentoring and resources needed for kids to do projects at the currently-competitive levels has literally been commodified. This underlying population change then explains why they don’t go into science careers.

1 point by sophyphreak 0 minutes ago | next | edit | delete [–]

It always fascinates me how much people bend over backwards to create euphemisms for "Autistic people" or, in this case, "high IQ, STEM-focused, Autistic people." Even "people with Autistic traits" would be fine. A large part of me thinks we would be better off to be specific, and another large part of me thinks this pattern reinforces stereotype of Autistic incompetence. (Stereotype of Autistic incompetence: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8813809/)

feeling massive scope creep in the use of this term 'autistic' of late... It's gone from a personality type we might call 'nerdiness' (and many entailments) to this kind of quasi-medicalised definition.

I don't think the "weird nerd" who is obsessed with the truth ever existed.

Is the lamentation that academics today are less objective, and presumably the tech and finance workers would have been more objective? I don't think the tech and finance people would have been academics in the precise areas of research that are suffering from an objectivity/truth crisis. Certainly it's not computer engineering that everyone is lamenting about.

As for the supposed objectivity of the "weird nerd", I don't know what to say. I have met more conspiracy theorists in my interactions with "weird nerds" than in my everyday interactions with normal people.

This is quite a thing to say. You honestly believe that truth obsessed niche learners don't exist?

I certainly don't think they were/are remotely as monolithic of a culture as depicted here, and the post's thesis hinges on it being so.

I see. I disagree that collecting misfits makes for a monoculture, and that's how I read TFA. I assumed they were collecting lots of different kinds of people, not collecting from a monoculture of nerds like a overly specific subreddit or something.

> As for the supposed objectivity of the "weird nerd", I don't know what to say. I have met more conspiracy theorists in my interactions with "weird nerds" than in my everyday interactions with normal people.

Conspiracy theorists are people who are obsessed with the "truth", so your observation supports the statement.

Being a conspiracy theorist isn't self serving, the only reason to be one is that you care so much about the truth to ostracize yourself. When such people have a well calibrated mind we call them geniuses, but most people get things wrong here and there and then they become conspiracy theoriests since they chase stupid theories.

I work both in an R&D group at a company and at the university and it's like night and day. At the company, if we need something to do the job it is simply purchased. At the university I had long meetings about whether or not I was allowed to spend 8 euros of my own grant money on VAT. In the company, if a project is under budget, good news! we can spend it on something else. At the university I was told to spend money before end of year on a software development project otherwise there may be budget issues. Moreover, the university provides very little reward for success unless you have a tenure track position.

What is the reward for publishing papers, getting grants, or doing other things that provide direct benefit to the university? Well nothing except perhaps the continuation of your job. This isn't even guaranteed even if you can pay for yourself with grants. There is a case I know of recently of a researcher with a non-permanent position and plenty of ERC money who was fired. Why? The state ruled that he had been in his non-permanent position for too long and the university didn't have any deaths recently so there were no open positions for him.

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself, what is the entire goal of academic research? Write more papers? The enshitification of academia has been the introduction of metrics, the expansion of the administration, the archaic phd-postdoc-tenure-track pipeline which simply ignores in many cases that a project may need more than one super star, perhaps they need a good team with different skills that work together. From my understanding, Edward Lorenz did not publish a paper for more than 5 years while he worked on his atmospheric circulation problem. This led to the entire field of chaos. Can you imagine a research scientist today simply rejecting writing papers, advising phds and master students, simply because he had things he was interested in doing?

There is a constant pulling away from your curiosity towards whatever it is you think you will be evaluated on. And it is insidious. It typically doesn't come directly from your supervisor. It is simply the environment you find yourself surrounded in. Academic societies give awards and cite the number of papers an awardee has published in recent years. You think, perhaps i should publish more? Your colleague gets a grant and their contract is extended several years because they now have money to pay for themselves. So you think, i should apply for another grant. You see people organizing sessions, workshops, special issues, etc. They become "known". You think, perhaps I should organize a session or a special issue. Perhaps this is all my inability to keep myself focused on a singular task and push my projects forward. But I don't seem to be the only one with this experience. There is always another Nature/Science/whatever op-ed on the plight of the post-PhD, non-permanent scientific staff.

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate my job. I love my job. I just wish I could find the singular focus that would drive me to complete more research instead of writing long essays on hacker news.

I'm also realizing the enshitification of school, but as a student.

For example, I'm currently worried I might fail my Python class because I'm waiting on tech support for this stupid product the school bought so the teachers wouldn't have to teach. I asked the instructor for help and his response was basically "well shit, hope you get it working because if you don't you fail the class, good luck"

So, what now? Because of their incompetence, because they're too lazy to teach, I'm a failure? Makes no sense at all.

If the technology doesn't work, and you didn't wait until the last possible minute to do it, file an appeal with the department or Dean.

This is how it works when you have a shit faculty.

Now. If the technology doesn't work because you aren't following the required specs, or you waited until the last minute to do anything, you're fucked.

Source: I teach in higher ed, but I do not use third party software because it's all trash.

My comment it's not going to help you by any means but it reminded me of how I was incentivised to learn Python on my own as a student more than 20 years ago because I had found Matlab and the whole process of trying to make Matlab work on my then home computer so, so dreadful (I had to use Matlab for some school-related projects, switching to Python during my free time made me saner). If the same thing is now happening to Python then the academia-related enshittification that you mention is indeed real.

I used to work in a German research lab around the time Germany declared that all government software should be FOSS. Maybe half the research staff were over 35 but under 55 so of course they were the matlab generation. To prevent a revolt they retained 50 licences that could be checked out from the licensing server. This was for around 750 total scientific staff. So someone made a listserv that you could email to request that someone give up their licence if they weren't using it. This listserv probably generated around 100 emails a day.

How did you get started in R&D? I've always wanted to get into "exploratory" software development.

Learn to work on code that nobody else wants to touch.

Tried that and ended up stuck with legacy enterprise software.

Have you asked for a raise lately?

Instructions unclear, have career in infrastructure now.

I did a PhD in physics/ml and slowly since then my work has become more and more software development.

Academia has become a prestige obsessed pissing contest. You need to go to a presitigous university for undergrad, so you can find a PhD position under a famous professor at another prestigious university who has lots of connections to the editorial teams of top tier journals, so you can publish at the prestigious journals, so that when you finish the PhD you can do 1-2 (or 5, or 10...) postdocs with other famous professors, so that by the time you compete for tenure track positions you use the connections with famous professors and publications at prestigious journals to become a professor yourself. Once you make it to professor, you need to use the connections and the prestige to get the big grants to hire lots of PhDs and postdocs yourself to continue the cycle.

If at any point you prioritise your drive and passion for a subject over the prestige and connections game, the peers who play the game will get far ahead of you in their careers, and you won't make it to professor. Saw too many 38+ year old postdocs who thought quietly pursuing their passion in their subject would get them anywhere.

No wonder all the people who just wanted to do their damn research went into industry. I did it myself and now get paid more than all of my former supervisor's postdocs combined. I don't think this even has to do with being a 'weird nerd'. Basically, at least in STEM, you have to specifically WANT to play the silly prestige pissing contest to stay in academia. Otherwise, forces of nature (economic and social), naturally push you out of academia.

> Once you make it to professor, you need to use the connections and the prestige to get the big grants to hire lots of PhDs and postdocs yourself to continue the cycle.

It is certainly strange that the final goal of academia is basically to create an org. Totally different from the image of the idealized scientist to me. But this does allow a lot of people to work in science. It probably allowed me to get my foot in the door when I wouldn't have otherwise.

That organizational structure has been called a pyramid scheme.

Or a tumor :)

The problem is that the people who advance are not the people who are good at science, so you end up with top down direction to chase fads while promising leads get passed over. When the fads don't pan out, the PI will push their postdocs to find something to publish just to keep publication counts up, and it doesn't matter if the articles are bunk because the lab is part of a citation ring so the authors influence will only continue to increase.

This basically reflects reasons I went from academia to industry. There is no real IC career path in academia, if you want to get paid more than peanuts you basically spend your entire life applying for grants and managing other people to do the work on them.

Now firmly ensconced in big tech, my cash bonus is roughly speaking the same as my previous salary, I don't spend my entire life filling in grant applications, and I get to work on interesting and relevant problems with a supply of cutting edge hardware rather than whatever I could find a grant to purchase, or the 5-year refresh paid for from the central pot, or some amount of hours on whatever the IBM rep managed to offload to upper management as a "supercomputer".

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