Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’ | Hacker News Reader

Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’

lemire.me

119 pointsjohndcook54 comments

My girlfriend is getting her PhD. We are planning a vacation right now. She works in a lab as a researcher, which is not a "real job" since she's getting her PhD. There are no specific regulations for vacation time, or anything for that matter. However, she's unsure how long she can take for vacation, and unsure whether she should ask her P.I. This is an example of the irony of academia.

On one hand, the lack of clear policies and regulations governing academia is one of its greatest advantages, because it gives your mind space to explore, and expands creative freedom. If you want to work from 5pm - 3am, nobody will stop you. Ultimately you work for your own advancement, set your own goals, and plan your own schedule.

On the other hand, when other people are involved, especially those with "seniority" like P.I.'s and advisors, it's no longer obvious what decisions you should make. You need to consider more than just yourself, but the lack of regulation creates ambiguity in the "politics" of academia. How do you balance the expectations of those with some power over you, with the expectations you have of yourself? I imagine this question is a source of pressure for many academics, especially those who are extrinsically motivated.

"I'm planning on taking a vacation from DD/MM to DD'/MM'. Are there any conflicts in the lab for that time period?". If the answer is no, she can put it on the shared calendar and have her mind at peace. If he says yes, then you can move the vacation to before/after the conflicts. (If the PI is formally opposed to any vacation, then it's a larger problem)

I used to be a PhD student (although I dropped out), so I know the ironies of academia too well. But for situations like this, clear communication in advance solves 99% of problems (and this is not specific to academia).

Not to pick on your girlfriend but I've seen a variant of this phrase so often that I'm kind of baffled:

"the lack of clear policies and regulations governing academia is one of its greatest advantages, because it gives your mind space to explore, and expands creative freedom."

Are the folks in academia so creatively stunted that they can't find freedom outside of the ivory tower?

It seems like such a silly argument.

Surely there are opportunities outside of academia that do not restrict you to the 9-5 grind or subject you solely to the whims of "the man." But academia is one of the only options where that kind of freedom comes safely packaged and institutionalized. You get the advantages of prestige without the risk of something like entrepreneurship, which may be another option for finding creative freedom.

Agreed. Academics put up with a lot of crap because they're extremely risk adverse.

Very true. The twisted irony is that the long term risks of academia are devastating. We have a lot more short term job volatility in software, but unless we work for some outlier asshole who torches our reputations, we can usually get new jobs. Academics almost never get fired except at legible points (e.g. tenure review) but when they do, it ruins their lives in a way that most of us have never experienced.

>You get the advantages of prestige without the risk of something like entrepreneurship, which may be another option for finding creative freedom.

Entrepreneurs have to make a profit within 3-5 years. Research almost never will -- but when it does, holy crap!

You do not have the luxury of doing serious research in a startup. At best you can do some applied research with a high probability of success. Mostly you just apply research to a given problem area.

I left academia because of the politics involved, and opted for a freelancer existence instead. It works very well for me, as I have plenty of time to pursue 'academic' interests. But I do realized I'm very privileged as a developer, where I don't have to spend much time looking for clients and worrying about money.

But for those who yearn for freedom, are capable of building websites or web apps, freelancing might be the path you're looking for (at least, for now).

well you could go work at google, amazon, facebook, or microsoft if you felt like writing an unending stream of javascript to better serve people ads. there are researchy parts of those companies but getting a job there is a lot like getting any other academic job in terms of competition and number of applicants, so it's effectively academia.

what wondrous land do you propose that will support researchers and their desire for a few months out of the year to think about stuff? at most companies, you won't get a few minutes out of the day to do anything other than pack numbers tightly into excel or go to your next standup.

I'm just curious, but your comment suggests to me that it is easy to switch from an academic program to working at google, amazon, facebook, or microsoft. Those jobs require training and experience that academia does not provide. Writing javascript and researching, as an example, topology are very different things. I also have a hard time believing that research at a corporation is effectively academia just because they share a competitive environment. Could you explain further?

well, if you're in a good PhD program for computer science, you probably have a really good BS in CS from somewhere with a high GPA and demonstrated work experience in the form of research, which was probably programming. your research probably involves developing some kind of software, if yours doesn't you as a student probably do programming for some other system that is someone else's research. you also work with other people and have deadlines and so on, so a lot of CS "research" is basically a job writing code for money.

my impression of research at facebook/google/microsoft is that they generally hire phds and they generally take phd students as interns, so if you drop out of a phd program, you're not working there (in a research role at least). so you have to finish your phd, then compete with everyone else for those jobs, just like postdocs and professor positions. once there, you have to justify your existence / funding the same way that you do as a professor (go ask people at MSR how this is going for them lately).

I've worked at a few companies. My work rarely involved Javascript and never ads; I've not packed anything into excel and I had plenty of time to think about stuff. So please don't paint things black and white.

It's still harder to get a good academic job than a decent job in industry. I left a PhD program when I realized just how bad academia is, in comparison. Sure, you have to be good at politics to get a great corporate AI job, but you need political skill to get through academia as well. Politics is just a necessary evil; so just learn it so you can get things done and get back to more interesting stuff. It's not hard compared to category theory.

In the corporate world, the failure mode is a crappy job that still pays as well as the AI gig; it's just not as sexy. Then you can slack, learn the skills for your next gig (it's not like you need to be in academe to read papers) and get something better. In academia, the failure mode is being dumped with no money and no reputation in some godforsaken No Country for Old Men reach, being 35 and trying to get an entry-level gig in something.

I'll second this--again, it's not like every second of your 9-5 is micromanaged: in fact, any shop like that is probably run by people that are easy to game with just a little application of intellect.

I wholeheartedly support the concept of slackademia...using idle cycles at work to learn about new, exciting things.

there's a big difference between "if I clock out an hour early, I can read some wikipedia pages before I commute home" and "take the next three weeks and read these 20 papers"

Stop strawmanning.

It's entirely possible to leave a paper up in a tab, read it over lunch or just when taking a break from your work, and continue.

This isn't rocket science--nobody is >80% all day erry day in their time usage, regardless of what they claim.

I don't think it's a strawman. A lot of academic work is much like creative work. You can't quite plan it in an hour over lunch. I've gone from academia to a very 'free' corporate environment, and in that context I found it hard to do the 'academic' things. To me, it feels much like creative work, where I might need a few days of nothing (leaving whatever it is I'm doing in the back of my head) before i can produce anything. It's really difficult to cram that into an hour here or there, or an evening after spending an entire day at work.

So, I think there is kind of a core disagreement here: either you believe that you can do creative work with your idle cycles, or you believe that you require large blocks of unfettered time to do it.

I suggest that both are true, though one or the other may be a bit more efficient for a given situation.

What I dislike is this semi-unspoken assertion by academics that, unless you have the long hours of "freedom" provided only within the ivory tower, people in industry cannot be creative or do useful research. It's insulting to everyone who has made continual progress for mankind while working normal jobs.

Academics in many fields are very strongly socialized into the belief that nothing outside of academia is worthwhile. It isn't about creativity, it's about culture. They simply can't believe that there is a life worth living outside of the charmed circle.

Having moved from academia to industry, industry is everything academics think it is.

A lot of arrogant people, a lot of incompetent people, equal or more politics, very few "hard" problems where hard is defined as "I'm not sure if there is a solution to this, or if there is I have no idea when we will be able to find it, if ever."

It's not about culture, it's about priorities. Academics are interested in solving hard problems or advancing our collective knowledge, not making a bank account higher, not serving ads, and not entertaining people.

Sure, in any large group, there are standout counter examples, but they are the exception, not the rule.

There are many problems that are known to be solvable in principle (because there's a paper) but in practice are not solved because production-worthy code isn't widely available.

For example, the existence of the Paxos paper didn't mean that most organizations could actually use distributed state machines in real life.

So how about "write the definitive library for X so that nobody needs to write this code again?" That ought to count for something. If you want to see problems solved for real (not just in principle), maybe you're better off in industry.

>So how about "write the definitive library for X so that nobody needs to write this code again?" That ought to count for something.

That sounds like a job for the open-source world.

  > On the other hand, when other people are involved,
  > especially those with "seniority" like P.I.'s and 
  > advisors, it's no longer obvious what decisions you 
  > should make.

This problem has been described as "The Tyranny of Structurelessness." [1]

[1] http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

I left in the middle of a PhD for mostly this reason. I was introduced to politics of the department very quickly because I learned my advisor was not popular with most of the rest of the faculty. Only two of them would collaborate with her. She had a big fight with one of the more established researchers over patent rights a few years back.

I had met her as an undergraduate five years prior to when I became her grad student. She was pleasant, albeit a little pushy, but nothing offputting. She had changed in the interim. She would yell at me (and her other students) in her office for the slightest mistakes. During a meeting with other researchers and my colleagues she accused me of not completing my work. It took all my strength not to tell her to fuck off and walk out. Mind you, this woman gave me a rare A+ in her course just a few years before because I did stellar work.

She's certainly infected by the anxiety of academia and she passes it on to her students and subordinates. When I saw how being a university researcher transformed her I decided to give up my chosen route. It didn't seem worth it to me if there was a significant risk of becoming a bitter asshole.

I became a software engineer. So I probably make double what she does, I have a fraction of the anxiety and I'm not a bitter asshole.

The worst consequence of this insecure, anxious, hypercompetitive culture is the near-impossibility of sincere collaboration. I speak from my experience as a very successful grad-student and postdoc in synthetic biology and neuroscience. Unlike equity in a startup, the kudos credit for publishing a high-impact paper is really only split between the first author and the lab PI, removing any incentive for trainees and labs to work together on larger projects. Of course, a great deal of noise is made in grants and PR about academic collaborations, but they are always paper affairs of convenience in securing funding, never truly incentivized joint missions, at least not in the biological sciences. I can't count the number of attempted collaborations that I've seen collapse in heated acrimony. As a result, most academic science is a very lonely affair, and the ambition of what can be achieved today in experimental biology is completely constrained by what one poorly-trained young researcher can do in a few years of hard labor with only a modicum of outside help and advice.

This is one of the things that struck me most about moving out of academia and into various other things: how collegial in the best sense of the word most of the engineering teams I've worked on have been.

In academia, if you're any good, you're a threat to other good people. You try to be nice to each other, but when it's you and a few dozen of your closest colleagues in pursuit of the one or two tenure-track openings in your field this decade... there are limits on how collaborative you can be.

In the business world, if you're any good, you're a resource and people want to work with you. It's pretty awesome, actually, although there are obviously bad situations as well. They're just fewer and further between.

> In academia, if you're any good, you're a threat to other good people. You try to be nice to each other, but when it's you and a few dozen of your closest colleagues in pursuit of the one or two tenure-track openings in your field this decade... there are limits on how collaborative you can be.

There are many "academias", but this is not my personal experience of it. Yes, I think most of us PhDs realize the bleak situation we are in, but still, we usually work together at the university as well as across universities.

Whenever I see a PhD student that has a better track record or just more talent, I am very happy for him -- after all, he's got a bigger chance than me for making it in academia.

There might be some politics and bickering among researchers/employees within a university, but that's something that happens in every community.

> In academia, if you're any good, you're a threat to other good people

This may be the case for career academics (professors), but in my experience, as a PhD student, at least in a day-to-day setting my fellow students were remarkably friendly and collaborative. The camaraderie within my advisor's group and within the dept as a whole was great; we were always happy to bounce ideas off of each other, always friendly and encouraging, mostly constructive in criticism, and it was generally pretty productive.

I think this type of rivalry comes out much more between different research groups at different schools. I can recall a number of times we thought some other group's paper was full of crap, and asked questions as such (usually politely) after the conference talk. But that mostly comes from a tradition of academic debate, not a 'shoot down everyone else so I can win' attitude.

I didn't stay for the "go on the job talk circuit and fight for a tenure-track slot" stage (actually I left before the "defend and graduate" stage, oh well), so maybe I'm just pleasantly lacking the visceral experience of that part...

I wonder if it's fair to generalize academia as a classic zero-sum game. Funding is, after all, limited by some mechanism analogous to central planning.

How to get the best out of people is a millennial long question. Egyptians used whips and slaves, we have been using money and propaganda lately, but everyone uses something that may or may not be the most optimal method. The issue is that people are individual and respond differently each time you ask them. My condolences on the loss of life (I too have felt like the world was asking far too much of me and I had no way out) but suicide is rarely the answer. Quitting your job, going to live in Montana for a while, having far too many beers, considering that everyone around you is an asshole, those are good options. And yes, I know it is real hard to climb out of those dark mental holes and realize this, but damnit you have to try.

If there was 2 things I wish the whole world could know, truly know deep down, they would be that you personally are worth all the stars in the heavens, all the grain in the fields, all the water in the oceans, and that everyone else is worth exactly the same amount; that we are all priceless.

"Best" is a pretty hairy topic. Does it mean "Most fulfilling existance", does it mean "Most benefit to humanity", does it mean "Most benefit to this country/children/etc..." There's no right answer. I submit that "Letting people expressing their freedom in a way that maximally lets others express the same." is more useful/enlightening/profitable than "Getting the best". But that's pedantic and hair splittery, like the rest of my comment. People aren't priceless. If we were industry would grind to a halt. There has to be a reasonable price on human life or there would be no calculating the impact of 1, 10, or 100 deaths, and then to upper limit on the $ spent on safety. The value of a human life is around 50-100K$/year to 100$K-10$Million Total, depending on the application.

Continuing this pedantry, one could argue s/he isn't claiming that what people _do_ be worth all the stars in the heaven, etc. This guy "getting a house in Montana" is him specifically rejecting that his worth is only his salary or position or career...even his pride. His sanity at least was worth it somewhat for him to take a sabbath to regain it.

I guess the next question then is what is it we value in ourselves and how do wee determine it? That's a harder question.

The question is wrongly phrased: it's not that we value things in people. People are terminally valuable.

>If there was 2 things I wish the whole world could know, truly know deep down, they would be that you personally are worth all the stars in the heavens, all the grain in the fields, all the water in the oceans, and that everyone else is worth exactly the same amount; that we are all priceless.

Which, unfortunately, only tells us that we perhaps ought to trade off human lives against nonhuman lives or nonlives, since we can't actually give everyone all the stars in the heavens, and don't yet even have the power to divide them equally.

But the sentiment, at least, is correct, which is far more than we can say for many things.

thanks (?)

That's me agreeing with you, but wishing we could do more about it.

"There is no trace of evidence that you can get the best out of people at high-level tasks through pressure and competition. The opposite is true. Worried people get dumber. They may be faster at carrying rocks… but they do not get smarter."

That last sentence is a great turn of phrase.

You reminded me of a fantastic video about positive and negative motivation, especially with how they relate to blue-collar vs white-collar work:

Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc)

Going into academia seems like the dumbest thing only smartest people do.

Jump into a job market where you compete against the bright and ambitious individuals who will do everything to out-work you to fight for a small prize pool.

The ending will most likely not be a happy one.

"Jump into a job market where you compete against the bright and ambitious individuals who will do everything to out-work you to fight for a small prize pool."

Isn't that sort of just defining finding a job in the general market? You're competing against other folks who are either more or less qualified than you are for a small prize pool.

That's the same thing.

> This is not, I shouldn't have to say, how academia works. Peter Higgs, of Higgs Boson fame, said that there was 'no Eureka moment' to his work, and he only has 4 papers listed on Google Scholar: but what papers! Science rarely has a Eureka moment: it's rather a series of careful, thoughtful developments of work done by one's forebears and peers. A management which demands a Eureka a day is one which doesn't just not 'get' academia, it's a management which contradicts the academic method and it's one which has forgotten that it's meant to serve the needs of science, the arts, students and researchers, not the insatiable maw of attention seeking 'Leaders' (that's the word they use now) and the PR office. It's also a management that kills.

slow applause

Life is an 'anxiety machine.'

Claiming academia killed this specific man is in extremely bad taste. And if we're speaking in generalities, I'd need to see evidence that academic positions correlate with higher rates of suicide.

Come now! Surely you can defend your sacred cow more vigorously than that. You're not starting to entertain second thoughts of your own, are you?

If you or I get fired from a software job, it's 2-3 months to find another one. A fired academic is toast. We have more month-by-month job loss risks but they have long-term career risks. One hit on your reputation and you're done as a professor. So, they face a different set of problems.

Academia didn't kill him singularly but I'm sure that it was a contributing factor. Was it murder? No. Wrongful death? Yes.

"One of the reasons academic infighting is so vicious is that the stakes are so small" - Kissinger

He's not wrong, but he's not right either. The stakes aren't so much small as they're impossible to wrap your head around. They tend to be something like, "understanding something we don't even know exists yet". Compared to something like global politics, where a stake is often at least quantifiable ("1 country", "500 million children", etc.), it does help explain the viciousness: it's not clear what's lost when there's a casualty.

I've seen academics fight harder for a new filing cabinet than bankers for a 500K bonus.

I didn't stay in formal education beyond high school so I can't really comment, but from that article:

"Unfortunately, some of his colleagues felt that he did not secure sufficiently large research grants. So he was to be fired."

However, Imperial College' statement on his passing claims otherwise:

"Contrary to claims appearing on the internet, Professor Grimm’s work was not under formal review nor had he been given any notice of dismissal."

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcolleg...

More fully:

"Contrary to claims appearing on the internet, Professor Grimm’s work was not under formal review nor had he been given any notice of dismissal. It is standard practice at Imperial to conduct both informal and formal performance management. Professor Grimm’s line manager met with him on a number of occasions to see how the College could help him to develop more competitive grant applications, for example through internal peer-review, collaborations and letters of support. Discussions included talking about the best place for him to do his science, both inside Imperial and outside, and, with Professor Grimm’s permission, his line manager made enquiries about opportunities on his behalf."

So this may still be a situation of pressure being brought to bear, just in some manner other than via formal review.

Wow, that sounds a lot like the first stage of progressive discipline. In other words, as I see it, he was in the process of getting fired.

A line manager for academics. We're not in Kansas anymore.

Professor Grimm's death is a horrible tragedy and a major blow to the community. He will be greatly missed by those who were fortunate enough to know him.

Perhaps institutions that issue grants should require that the receiving organization ban "quotas" from their internal policies.

Condolences to Prof. Grimm's family and friends.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8687714

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