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Comment by azalemeth | Hacker News Reader

Academia is the most relevant, toxic example that I can think of. Be horrible to others on a short term contract (grad students, postdocs) and break them whilst extracting maximum value -- get more papers, more grants written -- more money -- success.

Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic and managed into obscurity.

A great example of this is Peter Higgs, who famously said that he'd be unemployed pretty quickly in the academia of 2013. [0]

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...

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The challenge is to distinguish "think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute" from slacking.

I am not arguing for bullshit metrics - I personally love working on things that may or may not pay off on a 10 year+ horizon and wish I could do more of that. But at the same time I've seen enough people coast to accept that most places that either isn't - or won't be seen as - tenable, at least not until/unless you've established a stellar track-record first.

A system that can’t tolerate occasional coasting is a system that can’t tolerate creative bursts. The trick is detecting “I secretly lost hope but my stream of income is very comfortable” when paying a costly salary; which would be mitigated somewhat by switching the tenure benefit of either pay enough to afford, or outright gift of, a single-family home (looks pointedly at Stanford) to a variation of residence halls, where the salary gift can be much less in exchange for benefits due creativity: reserved whiteboards, option for neighboring private rooms (table/bed/bath/shower) and research office, a couple of quiet floors, 120/240 and ether/fiber in every room, presentation rooms with ‘lives next door’ IT support, etc.

Hell, I’d take that IT job. Keeping projectors working for a bunch of impatient creative types in exchange for getting to listen in on their presentations and earn their confidence enough to discuss their research as an interested peer while I repair their computers? Eating good food in a mess hall as I listen to quantum physics in one ear and mathematical networks in the other?! Onto the dream jobs list it goes, impossible as it might be in today’s academia.

Agree with this. Occasional coasting is great. Sometimes you need to recharge. Sometimes it's when you'll get inspiration or find time to do that experiment that feels like leisure because it's fun but ends up paying off massively.

Slack is important.

But so much so that you become a magnet for people who intend to do nothing, or somewhere where people who have fallen into doing nothing aren't noticed and dig their heels in and never leave quickly becomes a problem...

Academia has tenure which basically allows the most capable researchers to "coast" as long as they have previously proven their skills via their tenure-track work. It seems to work quite well.

Way back MBARI was looking for a role that in part included keeping the servers on their research ships going. That was my dream job. Only interview I completely failed because I wanted it so much and froze. Imagine eating Phils when it was still a hole in the wall, chilling in Moss Landing. Decades later I still daydream about that job.

Their open house is next month; if you stopped by in the morning and asked to learn more about their vessel IT and told your story, odds are they’ll have someone with that role ashore from last month’s expedition that could chat with you for an afternoon. They exist because of dedication and are likely to respect it in kind. At worst you’d get to visit MBARI with seasoning, at best live another life-sheaf vicariously through someone else’s experiences :D

Many billionaires are starting up ocean expedition places, surely they'll want IT. Off the top of my head I can think of OceanX (Ray Dalio), Inkfish (Gabe Newell), RevOcean (Kjell Inge Rokke out of Norway). They're all building or already have massive ships with sophisticated IT and research equipment.

We shouldn't really seek to punish "slacking off" though. Because when the opposite of valuable contribution isn't slacking off it becomes unintentional sabotage. It's a lot less noticeable in jobs that don't have immediate consequences for poor performance, but it really stands out in jobs where it immediately matters like construction. In a lot of cases everyone is getting paid the same but talent stands out and some people work 5x faster, but at thing they are good at. If you aren't the guy that lays 10x tiles perfectly flat and straight per minute then just bring the materials, set out a couple tiles and wait around. You will literally see this play out on most construction projects as it looks like 10 people are standing around while 1 person works, but that's because everyone tends to recognize that it's better to do what you are best at or just don't do anything. And the foreman will tell you that too, when all the dirt has to be moved, the shovel guys are just as important as the guy that can separate two nickels with an excavator.

I agree we shouldn't, but until we're at a post scarcity point, we kinda have to at least keep it somewhat in check.

But if you're standing around because there isn't anything positive you can contribute at a given moment, that isn't "slacking off" to me. That isn't the problem.

The problem is if you create situations that effectively encouraged people to seek them out because slacking off won't get noticed.

If you don’t “punish” slacking off your institution falls behind even if there is no sabotage

If an IT department doesn't appear to be slacking off it is doing a poor job. It's much better to pay someone who prevents fires and sits around appearing to not be doing much, than a team constantly running around putting out fires that are costing a tone via lost productivity but look really busy.

I imagine scientific inspiration/insight comes in flashes. The ability to be honest in the job/what is going on/realistic is going to get much better results long term with better mental health, and trust making better internal dynamics.

We pay firemen to just sit in a house and hang out! I saw them the other day, just going for ice cream!

How do we apply the perception that that's a desirable state elsewhere?

That's the basic tenet of bureaucracy. A formalized way of doing something when nothing actually needs to be done but in a way that you can notice and respond to things that actually do need doing.

In the end we have to face that systems have failed to replace competent managers. If there isn't a chain of accountability starting at the top that can manage people without extensive justification in metrics and is properly incentivised to keep the organisation healthy, whatever we are left with will be gamed to the detriment of everyone.

Anyone relying on metrics should know about Goodhart's law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

The certainly don't teach you that in business school :)

And the Xerox Alto had a budget for 10 years. Unthinkable in today's "What did you publish?? Publish or it didn't happen. No R01 for you! (2 year funding)" culture.

Why is publishing papers an unreasonable expectation?

Isn't that the primary mechanism for exchanging knowledge and driving discussion among academics?

If not, what should replace it?

I’m not in academia so I might not know what I’m talking about at all, but: “Number if papers published” smells an awful lot like bs industry metrics like number of lines of code written, number of features shipped, number of bugs fixed and so on, that the industry wrongly rewards.

I don’t know what you’d replace “number of papers” with, but it probably should not be so easily quantifiable and gameable.

I have published all my papers since 2023 on the web. None were peer reviewed, but on pre-print servers.

Einstein's 1905 papers were published without peer review.

I still get spam emails asking me to pay for papers I've already uploaded to public servers years ago.

Here's one from this morning- already deleted by Google's spam filter: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h8YVu5-DEx-1mOibiLpfJHrErvX...

The actual article was intended as a joke: https://vixra.org/abs/2405.0051 yet fraudulent publishers continue to treat it as a serious article.

It would be nice if publishing a fake paper every now and then could serve like a sinkhole for scammers, but I would be too optimistic or naive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_sinkhole

> A writer who is able to break free from the belief that his being is at his core, a writer, can break writer's block. He may also discover how to be a better waiter during his night shift.

Fantastic!

Thanks!

And academia will become even more toxic as opportunities shrink along with declining student enrollment. A lot of the third-tier colleges will close entirely.

This seems good, honestly. A degree from a third-tier college doesn't do anyone any good except the administrators at that college.

I feel great about my degree from my third tier college. I learned a lot I didn't expect to, got into a top tier grad school afterwards, and came away with no debt. Maybe me and the millions of other third tier college students are too dumb to know what's good for us, though.

I have been to a "third tier" college, but do you learn nothing there?

The competition for faculty jobs at any college is typically fierce, which means you can find excellent faculty almost anywhere.

> Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic and managed into obscurity.

I'm in academy and I'm mostly quiet and seek to contribute honestly and I've been managed into obscurity but I'm also quite happy, pay the bills, and more or less enjoy the work. If you want glory you have to deal with bullshit. If you don't want glory, life provides many opportunities to live a modest but productive life.

Over 99% of students who attempt your "mostly quiet" strategy are managed entirely out of academia long before tenure.

You won the lottery, which is great for you, but it's not a strategy to promote to others as life advice.

I'm not tenured and I doubt I will ever be and I'm not even interested in it. I have a support role in academia, get to teach, and am pretty well compensated (though I make 2-3x less than I could in the private sector. But its enough.)

It's the money side that applies pressure there. It's great that you're able to make enough money but a lot of people who aspire to the quiet academic life are stuck in the lower tiers making a pittance.

This is because there are far more people wanting a quiet academic life than there are jobs providing a quiet academic life with a livable wage.

And this is likely to become even more out of balance as college enrollment declines and there are smaller and smaller cohorts of freshmen as fertility continues to decline.

There are pittances and then there are pittances. I make a bit more than a typical adjunct or whatever because I have very specialized skills, but its ok not to make a lot of money.

I mean this is a place where the founder just wrote a blog post about being a billionaire. I'll never be a billionaire, thats for sure.

But I genuinely believe that pursuing that goal is vanity, bad for people mentally and "spiritually" and bad for the world.

There's a lot of wisdom here.

Great little article. 12 years later, he is still right on every count. Who would have thought that Peter Higgs was a very clever, clear-thinking man

I'm an academic mathematician in a US research-oriented department.

I'm happy to report that I've observed very little of what you describe.

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