90% of everything is crap. And there's no guarantee that the other 10% isn't crap as well. I get it, we need the social dialogue, so that people know how and why it's crap, but really the only way forward that doesn't result in eternal loss of control of your efforts to sociopaths with no interest in your happiness or society's well-being is to blaze your own path forward.
Academia is crap. Most jobs are crap. Most people do not make any dents in the universe. Most relationships end.
One should learn to recognize situations where irrationality is the norm. The easy one to spot is music. Way more people want to be musicians than the market for their output can bear. These market realities will dominate your life if you decide to become a musician. Doesn't mean you can't make it, just means that if you want a semblance of control over whether you'll make it or not, you have to create that control yourself and you'll have nobody to help you that can really help you because they have to deal with the market realities too. Even if you do make it you'll be similarly powerless to change the realities.
Once you understand the dynamic you will immediately see the pattern everywhere. Film. Academia. Comedy. The Apple App Store. The dating market for very attractive women. People who want me to work on their websites or otherwise hire me. Silicon Valley. You have to deal with all the other assholes in the world who want the same thing you want, and there's only so much of it to go around. The ones that succeed learn how to increase the demand for the services they want to provide. The ones that don't bitch about how unfair everything is.
Companies live or die by the value that they create for their customers. Films win or lose by the entertainment they provide. Musicians get rich or stay poor by the number of fans who enjoy their music etc. The post is saying that people in academia (Except those at the top institutions) are not judged by the value that they create for science and that this gets in the way of good science in many institutions. Science is not the kind of market where the most beneficial outcomes are automatically selected and the author is upset with how incentives and low odds of success are aligned to make his life in science anxious and unfulfilling. One can scold the author for complaining or one can take him seriously on his points about how society should better benefit from the money it spends on science.
Your examples are about popularity, whereas with science you switch to value. These are far from equivalent. Films win or lose by the entertainment they provide, but do the best ones win? No, rather the ones that can convince the most people to watch them win. It's quite possible that an unpopular movie would have provided a lot more entertainment if more people had gone to see it, but since they didn't, it loses. Likewise with music: just because some musician attracted a lot of fans doesn't mean those fans wouldn't enjoy some obscure musician more, they just never really made the choice.
I think it's useful to ask whether science is actually different in this respect, or whether this is merely an aspect of a universal problem.
I think you miss the pint slightly. Tons of musicians make great music, but the supply of good music is much higher than the market for listening can absorb. I have friend sin bands that play great music. They will never make it big because they're in such a crowded field only dumb luck or sheer brilliance will make them be picked up by the market.
So the point is that - even if people in academia are producing brilliant, applicable, great research, the truth is that academia produces more supply,than the market can bear. In such a case, it's like great musicians - most will have to be overlooked and only a tiny few will make a difference, either through brilliance, dumb luck or evil plotting.
>The post is saying that people in academia (Except those at the top institutions) are not judged by the value that they create for science and that this gets in the way of good science in many institutions.
That's because the "value they create for science" is far too diffuse for anyone to care. They need to bring in grant money, something people do care about, or find something else to do.
> really the only way forward that doesn't result in eternal loss of control of your efforts to sociopaths with no interest in your happiness or society's well-being is to blaze your own path forward
That is exactly why a lot of academics chose the academic career in the first place. There was a lot more freedom to pick your own problem and work on it than you'd enjoy in the average corporate job. There still is, for the most part. But if that advantage is eroding, it's worth talking about.
It's naive to expect that just because you choose academia, that you have a reasonable expectation to gain your freedom without a lot of path-blazing. It was naive before and it's definitely naive now. Just look at the numbers. How many post-docs vs how many tenured professors?
If you looked at the numbers and decided to try it anyway, you only have yourself to blame if you fail after throwing away years of your life. You didn't blaze a path, you didn't do things substantially different than your forebears.
If you naively didn't look at the numbers and kept going out of blind faith, then sorry, you wasted your twenties and got only hard experience to show for it. Don't feel too bad, 90% of your academic peers are doing the same thing. I wasted my twenties too doing stupid things. Probably most of us did. Just don't pass your thirties the same way and you should be fine.
Not everyone is an entrepreneur. We shouldn't predicate scientific progress on the ability of our most brilliant minds to also be brilliant entrepreneurs. It would be a huge disservice to mankind. Some people know how to look at an atom and unlock the universe. How do we change the system to let them do that?
It may be naive today but it wasn't a generation ago, when the numbers were more favorable to a young PhD. Something has changed, which is why people write articles to say, "Hey, stuff's changed!"
In the 1950s-1960s, the university system was expanding, in part due to the post-WWII GI Bill. Anyone with a PhD was pretty much guaranteed a decent job.
A pyramid scheme works well when the pyramid is expanding. It doesn't work so well when the tip of the pyramid is shrinking.
If EACH tenured professor has 1 graduate student per 3-5 years, that's nowhere close to the rate at which new tenure track jobs open up. There are some private sector jobs for Math PhDs, but even those have an oversupply.
It was still naive then. Students should have seen the huge numbers pouring in. They should have done the soul-searching then. You have to keep your head up and nose to the wind if you want any success at all in this world. It's always been that way, you're naive if you believe an institution can engineer success for you. No matter how many of your peers believe the same way you do.
>The ones that succeed learn how to increase the demand for the services they want to provide. The ones that don't bitch about how unfair everything is.
Eh, given the oversupply in academia, it really isn't fair to compare your situation to it. We're talking about orders of magnitude in the disparity between supply and demand in academe vs. the usual competition like in SV, I'd say.
Of course they'll face it elsewhere, the sociopaths who will control their lives. As someone said below, the disappointment is that academia is just like the rest of the world.Still, I think they need to be told it by articles like the linked so more fresh college grads won't go down that path.
> you don't have to live with the philosophy assuming people are assholes
It was not a statement of personal belief, but rather a tongue-in-cheek description of how we often view people who we perceive are getting in our way for some reason. Not intended to be taken seriously.
> You also have to be primed in order to see a pattern.
If you do something out of naivete and get burned, and you can't use that experience to recognize the pattern and avoid it in the future, you'll never earn any success in life because no one is born knowing everything one needs to know in order to earn success. You will eventually define yourself as someone who the world hates, who the world couldn't be bothered to tell how to get the things they want.
Academia is crap. Most jobs are crap. Most people do not make any dents in the universe. Most relationships end.
One should learn to recognize situations where irrationality is the norm. The easy one to spot is music. Way more people want to be musicians than the market for their output can bear. These market realities will dominate your life if you decide to become a musician. Doesn't mean you can't make it, just means that if you want a semblance of control over whether you'll make it or not, you have to create that control yourself and you'll have nobody to help you that can really help you because they have to deal with the market realities too. Even if you do make it you'll be similarly powerless to change the realities.
Once you understand the dynamic you will immediately see the pattern everywhere. Film. Academia. Comedy. The Apple App Store. The dating market for very attractive women. People who want me to work on their websites or otherwise hire me. Silicon Valley. You have to deal with all the other assholes in the world who want the same thing you want, and there's only so much of it to go around. The ones that succeed learn how to increase the demand for the services they want to provide. The ones that don't bitch about how unfair everything is.