It's not just the pay; the pressure as a graduate student and not-yet-tenured professor is immense. The darkly humorous "A (de)motivational letter", purportedly by one "Prof. Hardass Slavedriver", sums it up: https://lifesciencephdadventures.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/a-...
It's not just darkly humorous, it could almost be satire:
> It has to the the kind of chemistry that people read and then jizz in their pants, they’re so excited about it. That’s right: we only do jizz-worthy chemistry
I'll assume due to the nature of chemistry, the field doesn't suffer as much from non-reproducible data, but overall, this sentence alone might explain cases like the Francesca Gino fraud [0], or why the head of Stanford resigned over integrity issues [1]? Or the Schön scandal? [2]
I mean take the analogy seriously for a moment: What the author is asking for in the analogie's universe, is for one of his students to just invent Stable Diffusion so he can generate pornography for his colleagues to.. well?
But no word about integrity or honesty. Nothing. Just results.
Author took it as inspiration:
> The truth is that under all the profanities, and the slave-driver mentality of the professor I saw someone who truly wanted to develop their students.
PhD students of HN enlighten me, after reading this crap, how is this "slave-driver" not just incentivizing to cheat?
I think any system that rewards high performance also has the potential to reward (good enough) cheating. This letter can be motivational, and show the intense pressure to cheat in academia at the same time.
I'm not a PhD student, but I stopped after a masters exactly because I didn't want the pressure we're discussing.
Huh? Nothing matters but results anywhere. Why would it be different in academia, where funding is always tight and tenure-track jobs scarce and hotly contested?
