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Where are all the scientists?
After some experiences doing research during a bachelors and masters degree, I had had enough of an experience with academia writ large and academic research in particular to know that while I enjoyed some aspects of it, it wasn't for me. Getting a PhD is a grueling experience that I don't have the work ethic, and, in the field I was most interested in, possibly the intelligence to make it through. Since I've never spent any time as a practicing scientist, I've long felt like it wasn't my place to criticize the institution of science or scientists. Now, a few years later, I've gotten more experience with academic research second hand through a close relationship with a graduate student who is experiencing all of the trials and tribulations that I bailed on in favor of a cushy job at one of our economies massive digital rentiers.
Writing my master's thesis was the closest I got to actual academic research, and the experience left me decidedly soured on the whole endeavor. I did all of the work. My adviser knew little about the subfield I was focused on, and barely had the time to read enough papers to keep up with her own subfield much less learn one that a student who would only be there for a year was interested in. I didn't really expect anything different given the nature of her incentives and my prior experiences. I was however a bit surprised when I mentioned off-hand that I was doing all the work and she took exception, pointing out that she gave advice and suggestions during out weekly meetings. These meetings consisted of me explaining what I had done and her giving mostly terrible and out of touch advice that would have crippled my project had I heeded it. I believe she made one genuinely helpful contribution to the research over the course of the year. Again, this is all perfectly reasonable and I hold no resentment about it, but I did find it bizarre that she didn't realize just how little she had contributed to the actual work. This was not a relationship between two researchers working on a problem together, it was a relationship between one (somewhat bumbling and lazy) researcher and a mildly interested administrator whose job was mostly to make sure I had done sufficient work to graduate.
Since that experience, I've gotten to witness that dynamic second hand through my graduate student friend and her extended network of graduate student friends. Her advisor is much more hands on than mine was, but we know PhD students with advisors just as out of touch with their work as mine was with my thesis work. Even my friend's blessedly engaged advisor never does any actual research. He has not touched any of the lab equipment in anger in years (exceptions are of course made for photo ops). He does not write any of the scripts to analyze the data his students collect. The one area where he is intimately involved is in the production of the true output product of academic research: technical writing about the research. Specifically, he edits the technical writing of his students furiously. His other main contribution towards research is securing and retaining funding, a task which is done by the production of yet more technical writing.
Though our society calls my friend's advisor a scientist, he isn't one. Calling him a science manager would be more accurate, but I think that that too is not quite right. I'm a programmer by trade, and another analogy that springs to mind is the technical team leads who get to the point where they stop writing code and are wholly occupied by ancillary activates such as writing design documents, coordinating with other teams, and reviewing the code of more junior programmers. If this goes on long enough, these people's skills can dull. I'm reminded of the time that I interviewed a fellow who had previously spent a 10 year stint at Netflix and, if his resume was the be believed, lead some fairly impressive projects. I expected him to breeze through the interview, but he couldn't code his way out of a paper bag. I think professors engaged in research are generally some combination of a science manager and one of these not-so-technical team leads.
By the time anyone gets tenure, they have been forced by the inexorable Moloch to have spent the last several years acting as one of these science coordinators. If they try to do any research themselves they will get out-published by someone willing to hire 15 grad students and keep 6-10 balls in the air at once. At this point they will have spent around 5 years being an actual if initially poorly trained and little supported scientist (a grad student), then probably a few more years on top of that (as a postdoc on multiple postings). On top of that, they must be unusually intelligent and driven to have gotten so far. This means that they still likely have their edge when they get tenure. At this point, they even have the option of of becoming a real scientist again. They could stop hiring grad students to cut their lab down to a reasonable size and actually start spending time in the lab themselves. Few choose this option when it means giving up on becoming at the "top of their field" and when their compensation is tied to the amount of grant money they can bring in.
Upon achieving tenure by being an effective science coordinator, the ambitious academic continues in much the same pattern that got them to where they are. They may retain their edge, after all these are our best and brightest, but I suspect that many of them on some level go the same way as the poor fellow from Netflix. I imagine most don't fall quite so far as he evidently had, but as time goes on, the skills that they learned as graduate students and postdocs will dull and fade. They are required to teach classes, so their theoretical fundamentals remain very strong, but their ability as actual practitioners falls off. That friend of mine frequently complains that the senior "researchers" she works with ask her to do things that are just clearly not going to work from the perspective of someone who is in the trenches day in and day out.
My manager is a very good programmer, but he does not view himself as a programmer, he views himself as a manager. As such, he does not make an effort to tell me how to do my job, though he surely has opinions on it. He understands that because he not working on the code as part of his day to day work, he doesn't have the right context to make technical decisions, and I do.
Science coordinators do not possess the graciousness of my manager. Since they view themselves as researches rather than coordinators of researchers, they are quite willing to hold forth on the right way to do things. For this reason, bad decisions are made in the pursuit of research when science coordinators tell senior grad students how to do their job. A complicating factor here is the fact that junior grad students do need to be told what to do, as our system does almost nothing to train them to be scientists before they are expected to be generating data in the lab (they are pretty smart though, so in time they will learn through osmosis from the senior grad students).
Another problem with the fact that science coordinators do not view themselves as managers is the fact that they tend to make no effort to actually learn or apply the art of management. When one of my older relatives made the transition from being an individual contributing engineer to an engineering manager, he spent about a year poking through management books. I'm generally pretty skeptical of the MBAification of things, but the field is not entirely without merit and I do think managers should at least take the time to think deeply about what it means to lead people and to hold power over them. At the very least, they should recognize that they are managers and they have some new, uniquely people focused responsibilities.
Micromanagement and mismanagement in general makes the lives of grad students hell, and maybe even leave some productivity on the table (though given the brutal competition of academia I tend to think that the professors that make it are the ones who have figured out how to wring every last drop from their grad students). Beyond that though, there are societal impacts. Whenever a "scientist" wades into the public discourse, they are inevitably a science coordinator rather than a practicing scientist. They are likely well suited to that role since the one remaining technical activity they engage in is technical communication, but the public is still deceived by this inaccurate title.
I think the larger harm done by this system is the utter waste of human capital. As I've mentioned a few times so far, grad students come in as untrained neophytes, so don't become productive for a year or two. Even once these young researchers become competent and effective practitioners, they are still inexperienced. They reach their most experienced period as scientists when they are postdocs, but postdoc postings are not long enough to delve deeply into a field. Then, at the height of their powers, they become mere coordinators. There are no graybeard scientists. This, more than anything seems like a tragedy. Brilliant professors should be doing science, not writing grant proposal after grant proposal and copy-editing their students work.
Much ink has been spilled about the fact that technological progress is getting slower and slower per researcher hour as we push the technological frontier further and further out. Scott shows some good data that illustrate this point in Is Science Slowing Down. Like Scott, I tend to think that the low hanging fruit theory explains what is going on here, but I wonder if missing scientists might be another factor.
In Slovenia, they have university labs full of only researchers who will do experiments for private companies, for a fee. They will invest in newer equipment to do more interesting experiments etc. They do nothing but research. On their off time (not researching on contract), they pursue their own topics with the equipment.
In Germany, there are many research labs, both state and non-governmental like the Plank society (though funded by the state!)
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It seems like this pretty much explains the replication crisis, no? There just isn't much expertise accumulating on how to do actual science, in particular data analysis. By the time you get to be a senior grad student, you might have accumulated some knowledge on what a solid statistical analysis looks like, but then you're either up (to an administer role where you don't get your hands dirty with data) or out of academia into industry.
I feel like the simpler explanation is that (as OP mentions) promotion is tied to bringing in grant money and grant money is tied to having sexy preliminary results to justify an expensive study.
So the incentive is just to make up some sexy preliminary results.
It's not that inexperienced scientists made a mistake with their data. It's that experienced bullshitters did what they had to do to stay in their high-prestige job.
t. Postdoc
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I am fascinated by your idea of what actions make a scientist. If an experiment I am conducting needs some beakers washed, does it make me less of a scientist if I have a freshman undergrad wash them--so long as I check that it's done properly? If the experiment that I designed needs some chemicals mixed in particular proportions and sequence, does it make me less of a scientist if a senior undergrad does it--so long as I check that it's done properly? If I design three experiments to test a theory, does it make me less of a scientist three first-year graduate students carries each experiment out--so long as I check that they are done properly? If there are multiple competing theories in my field and I have good ideas about how I can test them but to design the experiments in detail I would need to have a thorough and detailed knowledge of several disparate sub-fields and possibly fields in adjacent disciplines, and also I would need to raise substantial funds to finance such experiments, does it make me less of a scientist if I recruit a team of grad students and post-docs, each specializing in some particular sub-field and tasked with designing and carrying out experiments there, while I use my broader expertise and established credentials to convince whoever I can to finance these projects?
Are you less of a programmer because you don't program in Assembly? Or because you import modules? Are you less of a software engineer if you spend your time with the client determining their needs, then oversee the development of architectural design, APIs for relevant modules with appropriate testing system, and then hand off the actual code writing to a team of programmers?
I wrote a wall of text, so maybe you missed the bit where I said "He does not write any of the scripts to analyze the data his students collect." It's not that the grad students are the experimentalist and he is doing all of the experimental design and analysis, they do all of the analysis. My understanding is that the experimental design process is somewhat collaborative between the PIs and grad students, and I would say that participating in these experiment design meetings is doing science, but doing a bit of science on the side does not a scientist make.
The analogy with programming is not importing modules, it is writing design docs. You need to be a good programmer to write good design docs, but if all you do is administrative management tasks plus collaborating with actual programmers to write design docs, I'm sorry, you're not a programmer.
I agree with your assessment of what makes one a programmer. Programming is a specific technical skill, and what makes one a programmer is being good at--and doing--that technical skill.
A software engineer, on the other hand--or better yet, a software architect--need not necessarily do any programming. They can offload the tasks that require that specific technical skill to programmers.
I suspect that this is at the root of the contention between your perspective and mine. Do you regard doing science as a set of technical skills? Or do you regard doing science as making progress on our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world?
And once I phrase it like that, I find that the specific issue of our contention--under what conditions you/we call the people who progress our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world "scientists"--stops mattering so much.
The current system (in US) where one can progress our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world on a fundamental level is done mostly in university-based labs. These labs rely on funding to continue to make their progress. Funding depends on maintaining a solid and clearly-legible track record of previous progress (which in our system involves high-quality publications in peer-reviewed journals that are well-regarded in the field). Funding also depends on seeking out and getting those grants, and then making sure to satisfy their conditions so the lab can get more of such grants in the future.
So if I run a bio-chem lab (the Hooser Lab at Stanbridge) and my goal is to progress what we know about what causes aging and what may halt the process in mammals, then my main job is to make sure that my lab can actually make useful progress in my goal. I need to break down what my lab needs to do, what resources it needs to do that, and how I can get those resources. Then I get those resources, and oversee the process. And as much as I enjoyed writing scripts to analyze data when I was a postdoc at Whatihear Lab at Oxbridge, maybe my time would be better spent on reviewing drafts for publications (because I have the breadth of knowledge to connect that esoteric result to broader field, or to suggest in the discussion multiple probable interesting consequences), and speaking with grant-giving foundations (because I have built my reputation as a serious scientist and they will take me seriously), while a postdoc in my lab oversees the data analysis.
There is no meaninfful distinction between programmers and software engineers. I consider myself a programmer because I feel like it captures what I do more accurately, and refer to myself as a software engineer in situations where it is financially beneficial. Software engineering is programming plus bureaucracy. Lots of things involve bureaucracy. When it comes to software engineering, programming is the main bit. If you take out the programming, it's not software engineering anymore. I have no patience for someone who thinks they are contributing technically by building a pie-in-the-sky UML diagram and demanding that actual programmers implement their out of touch vision.
I think you're right about that this is where we disagree. If we take doing science as "making progress on our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world", well that applies to the electron microscope salesmen, academic departmental secretaries, directors of corporate research orgs, plumbers who install chilled water systems in labs, the maintainers of python and r, and any number of other people who contribute in some small way to the broad economic activity of advancing science. You my protest that since science coordinators work a bit closer to the main body of the academic work than the directors of a corporate lab, they are scientists, but both of those roles are mostly about coordinating the technical work.
Within our current system, that's what you need to do to push research forward. It doesn't mean you would be a scientist in that situation.
I'm not blaming PIs for the current state of affairs. They are operating within a system of constraints and incentives that they had no role in building. I'm just pointing out that they are not scientists, despite being the best trained people to fulfill such a role.
Excellent point! My follow-up question is therefore: what actual utility is there in distinguishing some of the jobs (professions? tasks?) that progress our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world as "scientist"?
I do think that this utility exists and is important. It reminds me of Feynman's description of cargo cult science:
In an organization whose purpose is to progress in our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world--and which has a solid track record of effectively making this progress--who are the people that are essential to the enterprise, and who are in necessary supporting roles?
If the latter: do they require transferable set of skills that are not particular to this specific enterprise? The plumber who installs the chilled water system is such; so is the CPA in HR; so is the janitor. The lab manager (like, in a chem lab) would need to have specialized knowledge to do her job, but it's still transferable set of skills (solid Bachelor's level knowledge of chemistry plus great organizational skills). These people do useful work that enable the enterprise, but they are not essential.
It's useful to reserve the term "scientist" for the former--those who are essential to the enterprise--to keep the telos of their profession foremost in mind. It's useful, because the scientist's telos is frequently in direct contradiction with goals people have (e.g., getting that publication after you put in so much effort into that experiment, if only those couple of observation points weren't undermining your hypothesis). Let me quote Feynman once more:
Yeah, I think I basically agree with that unless I'm misreading you. I think "scientist" has a bunch of cachet, and we should assign that cachet to the people doing what is normally thought of as science rather than pushing paper.
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Leaving for the industry. That's where they're all going. Grants are only a small part of the problem. I'm a math phys PhD candidate at a top school, all my cohort could get academic jobs if they want. Doesn't matter, well over 50% of them leave. Even ignoring the fact that academia pays like a tenth of what we'd make in the private sector, we also have to deal with a stupid amount of teaching duties, inane bureaucratic hoop-jumping, administrative bloat and grift, and yes, the whole grant nonsense. The fact is that if a PhD in physics left for quantitative finance right this minute, they'd be treated with infinitely more respect than anything academia can give them, and that's ignoring the financial aspect of it.
As for why science and tech is getting slower, I don't know if the general thesis is true (how are you even measuring levels of tech here?) but certainly a lot of frontier science hinges on two big, connected issues: (1) the technical machinery needed to make substantial progress in many fields now itself takes years to master, which not many academics are willing to do; and (2) the level of abstraction required for the most frontier of frontier work is getting so challenging that the totality of what Einstein through Feynman knew about math and physics is now considered basic, and the kind of black magic being done here would be challenging to even the most talented theoretician.
On the other hand, academia is also getting wider: as soon as machine learning became possible (there was a hardware barrier in the late 90s that prevented the earliest ML papers from being implemented), we suddenly saw a lot of new, low-hanging fruit to pick up, which is still the case in ML. Just look at the example of diffusion models. Their equivalent in statistics dates back to maybe even the 70s and 80s, never mind their equivalents in math and physics. When did they get implemented in ML? Half a decade ago?
I don't know how to predict the pace of science, I don't even have a grasp on its current pace, other than that yes, scientific journalism is so stupid that I can hardly blame the public for thinking that nothing important has happened. But contra what some people like Hossenfelder might suggest, I don't think physics is in a rut. Maybe empirical particle physics. We aren't picking up anything that's as monolithic in public consciousness like Einstein's relativity, but we have plenty of math and physics work today that are every bit as intellectually and practically dense. Of course nothing has the same oomph, but well, nothing has the same oomph as Caveman Grug discovering how to count, and we don't say that scientific progress has been declining since Grug.
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You're onto something here. Where I did my degree, the following was pretty much understood by all the students after their first few years:
The purpose of research grants is to get research done for the funder more cheaply than is possible in other sectors of the economy.
The purpose of Professors is to get funding and write grant proposals. This means anticipating what research will be trendy and making a lot of friends among the people who staff grant proposal review committees.
The purpose of the older graduate students is to do the research, write papers, and write grant reports, while mentoring the younger students.
The purpose of the younger students is to study and learn, while assisting the older students on writing grant reports and doing experiments. Oh, and to teach undergraduate classes.
Graduate students needing additional mentorship must actively seek it.
(We didn't have post-docs or research staff, but they basically allow scaling of the grant-writing work and supervisory work of professors.)
This was a decent system for graduate students who were self-driven and capable. It had many different failure modes, however: It rewarded professors for just enough surface level knowledge to come up with cool sounding projects that were in reality infeasible. It was hell for students who were given the new projects, because they had no mentors in their specialty, and had no idea that things were infeasible. Older students could be abusive or predatory, and unscrupulous younger students could wait until an older student had worked out nearly all the kinks in an experiment and then swoop in to take credit for the results. Professors had a bias for sudents running simple but creative experiments over meticulous work that was actually necessary long term for good engineering.
Like you, I had a professor with only a surface-level knowledge of my research domain. I was often given bad advice and advice that wasted time. (The students figured out that our PI didn't read papers, but read abstracts and skimmed figures, which made for some funny misinterpretations of the literature.) The PI's feedback on student work was vague and hard to understand. However, when it came to overcoming stuck research projects my advisor was a genius. The experiment-breaking result became the new goal of the experiment, easily publishable. My advisor also eventually communicated an understanding of how to write a good research paper, after which all those vague comments suddenly made perfect sense. So the relationship turned out quite valuable.
The worst part was the social environment. In order to get the PhD students had to become first author on multiple papers, but the PI would assign multiple people to each research project, bringing in more people the longer it took. I'm not sure there was sabotage (I'm dumb enough to fuck things up myself, thank you), but there was definitely spying and theft of results between students. The students needed favor with the professor to buy equipment: seeking the favor of the professor resulted in schemes much like those of medieval courts. Reading The 48 Laws of Power during my PhD, the content of the book depicted the social environment of the lab quite accurately.
Overall, it was a fun time, but I would probably recommend a gap year after a masters degree instead of a PhD. Travel the world, get more life experience, suffer less stress, have more fun, and in the end you didn't spend four years becoming the world's foremost expert in some experiment that is only performed in one lab.
Did you swap older/younger here?
No. In the specific incident that comes to mind we had an new student try to take credit for the results of a 3rd year PhD candidate after fixing/running the nearly-successful experiment while the older student was at a conference. Thankfully the PI saw through it. I'm sure it goes the other way too, though.
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Jesus that sounds horrible. Fortunately, I don't think things are quite that bad in my friend's lab, but her PI is known to play favorites. There is definitely a ton of political BS.
It was horrible. I only survived because I had a supportive romantic partner. I was under so much stress that my hair whitened. Apparently stress kills melanocytes.
Are you willing to give us a vague description of your field? I am guessing life sciences or maybe synthetic organic chemistry.
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I've certainly seen a lot of complaints along these lines, but I have no idea what solution is. One detail missing is that there are a lot of postdocs and private sector researchers who are often seen as grad students who "failed" to become tenure-track professors, so they instead go do actual research work. But grant writing or related begging for funding eats up a lot of time of the people who are supposed to be our smartest scientists (hot-shot tenure-track professors). And I've seen a lot of complaints that it also directs research in bad/inefficient directions. Research money has to be distributed somehow; not sure what a better system would look like. I assume "low hanging fruit" is part of the problem in that research projects used to be cheaper, so funding them was simpler.
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[Dumb question warning -- I know nothing about science or academia]
Could it also be a result of the commodification of scientific work? I think this is related to the low hanging fruit theory. As a total layman, when I think of scientists, I think of some lone genius fascinated by a specific topic holed up in a lab furiously running experiments powered half by reason and half by intuition. Or even of some rich 18th century Royal Society guy making discoveries in his hobby lab.
Speaking with zero knowledge, I'd imagine there are a few key differences today. First, there are way more "scientist" jobs available because of the massive increase in university attendance. A department that took in 50 undergrad students might have produced 5(?) graduate scientists while a department that takes in 1000 today with easier coursework might produce 700(?) (no idea about these numbers, but I'm sure there's orders of magnitude difference). Instead of a small collection of cskilled artisans, you now have a large army of somewhat less competent assemblyline workers, and so they all get put to work grinding out tiny incremental improvements on the assembly line for much lower pay and prestige.
I would also imagine that there was more of an apprenticeship system in the past, where you attached yourself to a scientist and learned his theories and maybe even carried on and developed his line of thought, almost like ancient Greek philosophers did. Whereas now, profs are graduating large batches of students that each get the same Artificially Flavored Homogenized Education Product crammed into their heads before getting put to work on the assembly line.
Perhaps there are still scientists in my idealized image out there but they are just a vanishingly small subset of so-called scientists? Not sure if any of this is on the mark, but I'd be interested in reading your thoughts.
I really don't know how things used to work, but that certainly seems plausible. Certainly as we produce more scientists the bar is probably lowered since the distribution of human intelligence is relatively fixed over time (the Flynn effect is not enough to make up for the expansion in the number of scientists, especially because it works mostly by lifting up the bottom of the distribution so we have more average people and less profoundly stupid people).
The idea of larger labs causing eroding an old apprenticeship model is interested, though in my experience smaller labs can be pretty bad learning environments because the professor does no research and there are not enough older grad students to mentor the new grad students. Maybe things would have been different if all labs were smaller and more professors actually did their own research.
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