tl;dr: I failed because I stopped working hard and I was unambitious. And once I got tenure, I thought I could slack off, play the cello, go horseback riding and be a full time mom. But the system failed me too - it should have come up with a way for me to not work hard, but keep my job.
I think her more important point is that to be a "successful," scientist, you have to be a domineering, workaholic, self-promoter with connections. Perhaps there are other ways to do science that don't push out brilliant people who want broader lives.
I really doubt that there is a place in the world for lazy, unambitious scientists.
Science productivity is nonlinear. Simple numerical example: if it takes you 20 hours/week just to keep up with the literature, teaching duties, etc, a scientist who works 35 hours/week is only half as productive as one who works 50 hours/week.
Additionally, science is cumulative. Those extra hours you put in build up your skills. This means that not only does the 50 hour/week scientist produce 2x as much as the 35 hour/week scientist, but his/her skills grow faster. So after a year, the 50 hour/week scientist not only has twice as many productive hours as the 35 hour/week scientist, but he/she also produces more per hour.
You may view the character traits exhibited by successful scientists as low status or unappealing. But that doesn't mean they are unnecessary.
We like to think of the field of science as a meritocracy, but it is fraught with politics, trendiness, and other human pitfalls. I have known FAR more post-docs who burnt out than succeeded, and not because they were lazy or unintelligent. Interesting that you would categorize them as such. This is something that affects men and women.
> You may view the character traits exhibited by successful scientists as low status or unappealing.
This doesn't make any sense, except as a pot-shot. Status is what it's all about in science. Brilliant, low status people are failures.
I don't know man. Everything you say about productivity in science rings equally as true for computer programming. And yet it is possible to be a reasonably happy, reasonably productive software engineer and never work nights or weekends. Why is science fundamentally different? Is there less good work which needs to be done and can be done by not-super-brilliant people in science than there is in software engineerintg?
If you peruse a typical conference proceedings or journal issue, "low end theorems/experiments" in the sense of slogging away on incremental work is almost all of what scientists do. The big stuff is pretty unusual.
But even those "low end theorems/experiments" are generally novel and build on fairly cutting edge work. On the other hand you can pick up an Introduction to RoR book and have a successful career without ever venturing outside what that book teaches. There are few science jobs that require no knowledge beyond what you'll find in a first year chemistry book.
I'm a bit suspicious of your claim about it being that easy to have a career in tech. (But also a bit intrigued -- I'm in academia and looking for a plan B, given the state of the job market...)
There are lots of dull and simple programming jobs around like writing CRUD apps for a small department at a large government office in North Dakota. If you can manage to learn enough to get the hang of the basics of RoR or Visual Basic or whatever, you'll be able to find someone somewhere that is willing to pay something for your skills. Those sort of jobs just don't really exist within the sciences. Of course the question is if you actually want to do those jobs.
I agree that science (or any creative) productivity is non-linear, but you go on to give a linear example of 30 hours of work being worth twice as much as 15 hours, so I'm not quite sure what the final point is. An obsessive/single-track mindset is the most striking thing to me about this type of work, which probably does require more than 37.5 hours each week to maintain, but perhaps not every week, and almost certainly not in the 80-100 hr/week range that some young researches tend to work.
I really doubt that there is a place in the world for lazy, unambitious scientists.
This is why very little scientific work is properly replicated and there are big distortions in the literature caused by scientists selectively publishing results that will seem fashionable in the current climate of opinion -- confirm a theory as it rises, and attack it as it peaks. There's an element of "timing the market" when publishing results.
It would be a big improvement if there were lots of competent scientists with secure jobs working a normal work week and publishing results that weren't distorted by the pressures that their ambitious careerist colleagues are subject to. They could try to replicate results and not worry if the answers they get don't further their careers. Why in the world wouldn't that be a good thing?
Maybe you are right, if you try to do it the way the majority does it - brute-forcing and less-efficiently.
As a counter example, a friend of mine was able to graduate a Math PhD from MIT in 2.5 years, and at the same time using every vacation to the max to do mountaineering. One of his tactics is that whenever he does math, he doesn't think about anything else - this way he is not wasting the time.
I don't understand the economics. It sounds like you're saying that there's no place in the world for a fully trained (though perhaps less ambitious than before) scientist, so it's better to start from scratch with someone new, who presumably will take many years of training to get up to speed. I don't see how we can afford such a wasteful system?
I recommend reading Richard Hamming's talk "You and Your Research"
> Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!
> What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.
As I'm sure you are aware, it would be extremely difficult to define "science productivity" as an objectively measurable quantity. So no, neither I nor anyone else have citations related to this claim.
My claim is based primarily on inductive reasoning and personal experience. I know quite a few good scientists, none of whom have any semblance of a work life balance. And when I was a scientist, the job was as all consuming as doing a startup.
I agree that the job is as consuming as a startup, but to call someone lazy for not wanting to sacrifice their person life, for their whole career is incredibly judgemental.
The big difference in a startup is that if you ideas really do work, after some number of years you will presumably be both quite wealthy and also have the time for a more reasonable work life balance.
Further, you seem to imply that it is all about science. It is not. There have been more than one scientist whose said that the amount of time they get to dedicate to actual research is the time they get when they get home at night.
The rest of the time is spent teaching, writing grants, and politicking. These are not things that all scientists want to do, and it's easy to understand why some become unmotivated.
Finally, in my opinion, one of the biggest negatives about being a scientist today is public opinion. The public feels you deserve to work on a minimum wage salary and that it's appropriate and correct for you to devote all your spare time to your job. Further, you best work on something the public deems useful to them, otherwise you are wasting time in your ivory tower.
It's hypocritical, because this level of judgement is not put on other jobs of similar skill level. I didn't even touch on the problems with the "publish X number of paper or perish" attitude that is all to common today.
"it would be extremely difficult to define "science productivity" as an objectively measurable quantity"
Stepping back from the original article, what I would say is that a lot of the problems in academia are perhaps caused by inappropriate rewards systems based on the idea that academic research productivity can be measured over reasonably short timescales.
I'd actually be more in favor of much less overt short term performance evaluation for academics and accepting that some will, undoubtedly, squander this privilege while others would, I believe, more than reward society for this trust. Of course, this would probably be unacceptable politically as the emphasis there is often to minimize the negatives rather than to maximize the positives.
The problem is that the way the academic system is structured, the negatives are large and the positives are small. Take the author of this article - she was mistakenly given tenure, and she squandered 10-15 years of salary + unspecified severance.
The solution is simple - eliminate tenure. Then you can take a risk on a promising scientist - worst case, you fire him/her in a few years.
Some institutions have eliminated tenure (especially in biochem), but run into the problem that you have to pay a lot more to get good scientists in that case, because scientists don't place zero value on tenure.
You may not even be able to get them at all, because there's a widespread perception that non-tenure-granting universities don't offer much academic freedom (especially in biochem, where they have strong ties with pharmaceutical companies). I could be wrong, but I don't believe these institutions have so far been successful in attracting top talent.
One hypothesis is that corporate research labs already occupy this ground well enough, so non-tenure-granting universities don't have much competitive advantage when looking for talent. If you don't care about tenure, want a higher salary, and are willing to accept the fact that management can review and direct your work, why work at a university at all? Why not Google Research or the R&D division of a pharmaceutical firm?
Tenure is meant to ensure that scientists have the freedom to work on topics that management deems worthless, but which may not be. Not to mention that people don't even get tenure until they are nearly 40 these days. It's not the problem.
"...I came home in 1989...to a tenure-track job, running my own research lab at a University of London institute, where I remained until the sad demise of my career...I got tenure..."
All the same, I'm not sure how she was on the tenure track given that no UK academic appointed (or promoted!) after 20 November 1987 has tenure. Perhaps there is a more complex story with her date of appointment, or perhaps, given that Science is a US publication, she is simplifying a tenure track equivalent UK position for a US audience.
But this is a side issue (my fault, I started it!), I'd agree with your basic point that tenure is a problem. Just, it's not the only problem and it wasn't the problem in this case.
I can think of a few, but "linear/nonlinear" doesn't seem like the right way to look at it. From what I've read, productivity has more to do with statistical distributions:
http://xw2k.nist.gov/dads/HTML/lotkaslaw.html
Very curiously, these distributions are self-similar in that even when you restrict the sample to top-tier academics for instance, they still hold.
I thought the most significant bit was when she lost confidence. Once you accept notion that you're incapable of coming up with good, original ideas, why be in academia anymore? Of course you're going to be bored, ignored by "the system," and start shifting your time and energy to other things.
While there are no doubt bad things about networking in academia, the good thing is that original thinking and research tends to be rewarded. Once you've given up on that, all you have left is the bad stuff.
There was a significant disconnect between her story and her conclusions (though her conclusions were mixed).
"Once you accept notion that you're incapable of coming up with good, original ideas, why be in academia anymore?"
I guess its the same dilemma faced by lots of people who love to write code - eventually most organizations expect you to stop doing the "grunt work" and move up to take a more management focus. Certainly 90% of people I knew in the UK in academia who were at Professor level were there primarily because of their leadership skills rather than any innately brilliant piece of work they had done as an individual.
Some people just don't want to make that step from doing to managing and in academia, as in many environments, the push is probably "up or out".
Some people just don't want to make that step from doing to managing and in academia, as in many environments, the push is probably "up or out"
The triumph of that attitude is sinking the company I work for. The best technical people were elevated "above" the implementers, and we ended up sitting all day in meetings and writing documentation for lower-level workers. Luckily the crop of people who replaced us were as good or better, but it didn't take them long to recognize the "up or out" attitude. The company has made it clear that excellence in a hands-on position is a waste and will not be rewarded, and people taking non-hands-on positions find they are a horrible boring grind for people whose interests are technical. (Though you do feel important being in such demand for meetings.)
Now all the best people are choosing the "out" route. There seems to be a relationship between how smart they are and how fast they've left, and I'm starting to feel pretty dumb for staying.
She did accept blame for her attitude. I think this is correct, though. If you don't think you're creative enough, you might as well take your PhD and teach at a community college. Or become a science writer.
I do think she has an interesting point about the "lone wolf," approach to science. For the most part, modern science is an inherently collaborative process, unless you're a star who likes to gloss over the contributions made by the underlings in your lab.
It seems like her problem was more a constant fear of failure and lack of acceptance, which reared its head to varying degrees over her career. That lack of ambition seems to have blossomed out of the realization that she'd sort of screwed herself over through the fear and self doubt. "Stopping working hard and being unambitions" wasn't the cause, it was the symptom.
The takeaway from this article, for me, was that you can kill your own career by doubting yourself, by not putting yourself out there actively and promoting yourself. Your own fear can close doors that will eventually kill your drive. That's not a foreign idea to me -- slowly recessing into a corner when I ran into something too foreign, or frightening, to easily comprehend and master has led to my engagement dropping off the map and to my becoming mediocre at something I should be excelling at. I've since gotten over that to a large degree (though sometimes "solving" that requires me to put on a false front and be confident and engaging with people I would otherwise avoid or shy away from) but I look back at past jobs I've had that I wish I had done better in, and the roots of my problems and hers ring as related in my head. (Even though I have never "slacked off" to learn an instrument, have babies, or be female.)
Sidenote: I don't know if you intended it or not but your post reads with a pretty contemptuous tone, which I don't think is needed. I think both "tl;dr"s in this thread are slightly offensive, but yours is more offensive. People racking up karma points via a summary always bugs me, regardless, but when its an opinion couched in a summary it's twice as frustrating.
What a bitch, she really should have given up when she wanted to back off and only put in the standard work-week hours. She should have been a single purpose slave, toiling away long into the night, never ever enjoying the compensation she was given, nor had any human qualities beyond scientist. It's doubly atrocious that she thought somehow meritocracy meant having some recognition and lifestyle security come from proving that she could contribute.
Oh wait no...
What the hell is your problem douche? Do you seriously believe everyone should just work and do nothing else? I hope 2 things for when you die alone and forgotten: 1. that you were told by someone that your existence was futile because you wanted to work less than every waking moment, and 2. that you had the realization that there is more to life than constant work but that it came too late for you to change and you are weeping bitter tears of regret as you painfully draw your last useless breath.
If we have a finite number of publically-supported research labs, I would prefer they be operated by people having scientific discovery as the foremost priority in their lives. I don't believe there are so few of them that we need to make do with people trying to fit it in as a day job around the mundane things they prefer. (Actually there's a surplus of people with this calling compared to positions we fund, judging by PhDs' horror stories about finding work.)
Science is not a 9-5 job. It can't be viewed in the same light as an ordinary career. You literally must drown yourself in your work in order to push the limits of human knowledge just a little further. Only certain kinds of people are cut out for this.
This woman characterized a TF that acts as an oncoprotein. That's not insignificant. It probably took her more mental, repititious, laborious effort than most people output in their entire lives. That said, when you burn out it is time to let someone else carry the flame. We can't waste precious, finite research funding on people who can't give 120%.
And now that she's done, we should throw her by the wayside and abandon her, leaving her to slowly fade away instead of putting people in the situation to properly guide her to a new useful place in the world. I mean so what that she provided something huge that could have a pretty important impact beyond her salary. There is not a better way to go about it at all right?
Further we should just go ahead and let douchenozzles like yummyfajitas talk as if she was a waste of air since she only provided useful research in the past and not currently.
She might want to go into teaching the next generation. (Undergrads, if she no longer has a lab.) I would do that if I were in a similar position.
There are plenty of useful, fulfilling things to do with the knowledge and experience one has accrued as a researcher. Why not travel to a different place and teach?
Good summary. However at the end, she decides it's not because she lost interest, but rather because "the system" doesn't make allowances for women in science who want to pursue other interests.
As opposed to the allowances it makes for men who want to pursue other interests? She was insecure, lazy, and unambitious. I think those were much larger factors than the mysterious lack of opportunities in science for women to do pursue things other than science.
Science is not stamp collecting. It's hardly about putting in the hours, and all about originality. Many Nobel Prize winners have hobbies in music or art.
