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Comment by flatline | Hacker News Reader

Academia is a recipe for burnout. It’s like pro sports, unless you are the top 1% of the top 1% you may be able to keep eeking by but will never be in a comfortable position. There is always more to do and you do not get paid well for your time. You are surrounded by people who pour their lives into their work and it will be expected of you. The culture is extremely toxic and dysfunctional.

Your lack of imagination as to another job is part of the trap. Work can be enjoyable, pay well, and you can still have a personal life, but academia sells itself as the only possible trajectory for a certain type of person. Most people leave academia and many of them find meaningful work outside of that.

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The problem in Academia is that its too crowded. With crowding, in many fields, the de facto way to progress has become to play corridor and department politics. I know completely clueless and incompetent researchers that made an effortless transition to faculty positions at top 10 universities, whereas some great postdocs were stuck forever, burnt out, and left. Ironically, some of said postdocs did the work the others took credit for in order to be promoted.

Some fields are more prone to this kind of behavior and power structures than others. Plus, in the past, it was much easier for recent PhD graduates to progress to tenure-track positions, without needing to do a postdoc (or many!) in between.

Actually, some countries have established regulations to try to prevent postdoc abuse, as faculty is typically interested in getting them to do all work, giving them little credit, etc. Some of my postdoc friends were supervising students, designing studies, and writing grants but their names were never officially on paper! Their PI used this as a way to getting them trapped. Without e.g. supervision experience, they would not be able to move to tenure-track positions, thereby getting stuck with him (as cheap labor) forever.

> I know completely clueless and incompetent researchers that made an effortless transition to faculty positions at top 10 universities, whereas some great postdocs were stuck forever, burnt out, and left. Ironically, some of said postdocs did the work the others took credit for in order to be promoted.

I've seen this, and it's happened to me. I'm at a much lower ranking uni and we partner with higher ranking unis and I can tell you that I know quite a number of people at top 5 universities that do not know what an expectation value, probability density, or covariance is. They get attached to my papers but I do not get attached to their papers, even if I put in more work than the reverse situation (I can't tell you what some of my coauthors did). I wrote an entire NSF grant, that we won, and my advisor told me I only played a small role. Even if true, that should be a red flag that the system is broken. Why is this so much about politics?

What we're seeing is the meritocracy-metric paradox. Where metrics are literally the biggest killers of any meritocracies. Every metric can be hacked and the more reliance you place upon them, the more they will be. The problem is people think metrics perfectly align with objectives and that this alignment is static throughout time. Neither of those is true and it is baffling to me that people either aren't willing to admit it or are willing to and then just continue as if it didn't. The world is fuzzy and metrics are just guides. I thought the difference between humans and machines was that we could generalize instructions to the intent and not the letter.

In bureaucracies like this, the fish inenvitably rots from the head. The people who offer the faculty positions are incompetent or indifferent. And the people who hired those people are incompetent or indifferent.

As such, it's a mess that literally can't be solved from within, it needs to be solved by the administration, and the boards who appoint them. The tenure system means it'll take generations to resolve.

Academia in the U.S. has seen systemic issues like this in the past (see: eugenics). Unfortunately the implication is that it'll continue to get worse until it's mostly made better by people retiring.

What do you mean by eugenics? That academics studied eugenics? Or that eugenics was widely popular among academics?

I guess the pendulum always swings to the extreme other direction. Today, the more disadvantaged your intersectional identity, the better your prospects in academia.

That eugenics was widely popular among academics, especially in certain disciplines like Psychology (the founding members of the APA were all eugenicists).

As an example I'm familiar with, the first generations of academics at Stanford University were socially-active eugenicists (see the founding President, David Starr Jordan, who hired people like Ellwood Cubberley and Lewis Terman).

Many buildings, awards, dorms, department chairs are still named after these people.

I agree, and I think that is the essence of the meritocracy-metric paradox. Those that hacked the metric become those in charge. I think that only reinforces the idea of metric hacking. I really think this concept is playing out at large and not just academia.

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