“How do we stop the world’s smartest people from realising what we’re doing?”
“Let’s make them fight among themselves and call it a meritocracy; we’ll limit their funding and let them keep themselves busy with political infighting!”
Annoyingly insightful.
This “have to play political games to get ahead” bullshit seems to apply almost everywhere.
Yeah, humans are social animals which create social systems everywhere they go. This shouldn’t shock anyone.
They do. However, the quality of a person’s work should be more important than their schmoozing skills. Not a shock, but definitely an annoyance.
This is how any new field of work or science starts out. Then, as money starts to be made, the field comes to the attention of the money- and power-hungry who slowly take it over and transform it into something they can control with politics and shenanigans. These people didn’t have the intelligence or passion or drive to create, but they know how to play people to get what they want. Unfortunately the good people too often let themselves be shmoozed by them and that’s their “in”
I know this term is overused, but it’s essentially enshittification. It didn’t start with the internet.
I’m genuinely confused how everyone is reacting to this. What good is research that no one cares to hear?
The research should speak for itself. Assuming the person judging it is competent, it shouldn’t need to be “sold”.
The people with the money don’t understand the science. If you can’t convince them that your science is worth investing in then why would they give you money? What’s really shocking is that a Nobel prize winner isn’t smart enough to understand that.
The idea is that those people shouldn’t be the ones with the money.
Then the academics should get better at taking it from them :)
The problem is not that one has to communicate the significance of research. However since the people with money don’t understand the science, they can easily be mislead. And there are also big trends when it comes to funding so you can participate in the buzzword olympics to secure your funding. And this is where you leave the path of just communicating your research and its potential honestly.
The second point where this Nobel prize winner is very right is that it’s all about networking, all about names. I don’t know why we can’t just publish research under a pseudonym, a number would suffice. This would make publishing and reviewing less susceptible to bias.
Same reason why we name amps and volts after Ampere and Volta. It’s about recognition and legacy. Imagine you discover some new form of matter, a specialized region of the brain, a key component of time travel, or some algorithm that accurately describes any human interaction. Something revolutionary. Would you be content if it wasn’t named for you? Ormr Matter, Ormr’s Area, Ormr’s Theory of Inverse Relativity, Ormr’s Equation for Social Simulation. This is really just the extreme case, but I think it works well to demonstrate the point.
Would you be content if it wasn’t named for you?
Yes. I recognize that most people don’t think this way, though.
Very well put. That’s a big reason why the world is on fire: People trusting bad actors too easily because they know how to talk good.
At that point it should become a problem of educating, not politicking.
Competence is judged by their ability to communicate the purpose and results. Lack of social skills also detracts from the audience who is willing to review it.
Valid to a degree, but there’s such a thing as placing too much value on the person presenting it rather than the content of it. It seems like too common an occurrence.
The thing is, “research” doesn’t speak, humans do. If a tree falls in the woods… and so on. Part of being a scientist is communicating what you’ve done, otherwise no one else will know. It’s a skill that has to be developed in some more than others, and it was a key part of my training as a scientist. I don’t really like that part as much, but I do it because it’s what makes my work have any impact.
This might sound pedantic, but it isn’t, it was actually naive: I expected a better environment in academia when I was young.
Why? Because academia is supposedly full of bright people, and I assumed they would be bright enough to be cooperative (because academia advances more when we are, and they supposedly love knowledge); unattached from superficiality (like judging people by their looks, money, etc., because they should know an interesting person can come in any “package”); relatively ethical (as bright people should figure out something close to the categorical imperative, although with unique details); a non-dogmatic, eager to learn and correct their ideas —over preferring recognition and pettiness— attitude (again, just because I assumed their intelligence must guide them towards appreciating knowledge and authenticity over much more ephemeral and possibly worthless things such as prizes, fame, etc.).
I was wrong, so wrong. It’s painful to remember how I felt when I realized it…
But I think the premises weren’t entirely off, I just imagined people much wiser and more intelligent than they are, myself included. Anyway, I fully understand why others are shocked too.
I’m sorry you went through that. I grew up around academics – a few of my parents’ friends were professors and one was a research chemist, then I had several former professors as teachers in high school; the message from them was always clear – academia is awful because of politicking, backstabbing, and the neverending need to be publishing something next week no matter what you did last month.
The quote, often misattributed, “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.” has always stuck with me because of this. As I watched my wife pursue her postgraduate work in Chemistry, I was granted the unfortunate privilege of seeing it first hand. She now works as a children’s librarian and is much happier.
At the top of academia everyone is tenured. Everyone has proved their intelligence. It is so political because there is so little at stake
I only read the first sentence and the last. Just like every reviewer ever. Be well.
Read some Foucault for an explanation, that’s just being human. You don’t stop being human just because you follow scientific ideals. All human endeavors will follow human dynamics.
No. Science is the only human effort that specifically defines what human is. If we allow that “sure being human is going to mess up science” then we have failed before we even started.
I’m really surprised, although this is becoming kind of common so perhaps I shouldn’t be, to see all the comments saying effectively “yeah, so?”
Science doesn’t define what humans are. Humans are, then science plays catch up to try and define what that even means. Science is a human endeavor, a framework of thought, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it cannot exist without humans thinking, talking about it and doing it.
So if I ask you to define what a human is, you’re not going to draw at all from any previous scientific studies?
I doubt it. Not to get too ontological, just saying science (biology, psychology, anthropology) very much do define what human is.
For a lot of people, I would think that the answer to “what is a human?” Would be closer to religious and philosophical definitions than scientific ones.
Not an academic, but this is spot on for how I’ve felt as a top performer getting nowhere. This realization helped me reorient my aspirations to what I find truly matters to me: my family and hobbies. I’m a solid individual contributor. Over the years, my work has saved us millions and been adopted across the country, which is reward enough. The speaking engagements and schmoozing, I’ll leave that to the extroverts in the boys club.
This is the fucking world. Like it or not it’s about putting yourself out there and networking. Doesn’t matter how bright you are. I wish it wasn’t but it is.
I’m trying to imagine a job where being a disagreeable antisocial recluse is an advantage and I’m coming up blank.
That is hardly the idea the author is trying to give…
IT Business Analyst
IT is super hierarchical and requires immense political skills to get anything done.
Owner of Twitter?
Sorry, unless you start your own sovereign country, you have to participate in society. Not everyone likes promoting themselves, disagreeing diplomatically, etc. Still, we play the game, even though I wish we didn’t all have to…
That is true it is a big part of society and how to get along, and you would think that because this is one of the foundations of this society it would be a bigger part of someone’s education. This shouldn’t be something people should have to figure out on their own in order to feed themselves and their family
One semester of Schmooze 101 could go along way in helping an awkward yet brilliant scientist get the funding they need.
Well there are two alternatives that let you not do it. We either die of starvation alone and isolated, never cooperating with anyone. Or we club and bomb each other away in endless fight and war over resources. I like the being diplomatic, political and deliberative way much better than either of these, even if it can seem a bit hypocritical and tiring some times.
Yes but didn’t we all know that at some point before choosing that career? How do you get roughly 22 years into it - a PhD - and not know that academia is essentially a political rodeo and your research is going to be affected heavily by it? Didn’t anyone whisper it to you confidentially in the back of some elective?
It most definitely shouldn’t be, it’s clearly poisonous to the idea of science, but it wasn’t like a secret either. Like, it’s “not ok” that that’s the case, it’s not something we should wave away as “just human things” - it should be addressed, it should be fixed. But it wasn’t unknown.
There is no alternative if you actually want to do science and don’t have millions of dollars to buy labs and materials and instruments. Science gets done in spite of everything she is describing.
Fair, but how does someone take on that career and not know that?
I think it’s the degree of bullshit that increases gradually. To speak from experience, when you are a grad student you get a feeling like there’s corruption but overall your project seems like it’s important and making a real contribution (hopefully). You also don’t have to worry about where the money is coming from. Sometimes the grant as a whole is total bullshit but there is enough discretionary spending included that great science comes out of it. But you don’t realize this until you’re writing grants, and by then you’re maybe too deep in the game to pull out. Essentially, you end up becoming a manager once you get tenure. There is no epiphany; it’s more like a slow creep.
Okay. I dunno, for me it was expressly stated by many people.
It’s definitely unknown to the vast majority of the tens of thousands of college freshmen who sign up to be STEM majors. Usually by the time they figure it out it’s already far too late to change their majors without rearranging their entire lives
Well, hopefully this will help change things then. It’s definitely not new.
Depends on the program you are in. The view from being a doctoral student to being a postdoc to being research/lecturing staff is very different. Not all advisors expose their students to the realities of higher levels of academia. And when a woman or minority is being mentored by a white man, they may not be aware of biases that can affect the student’s later career.
I mean, maybe I had a different view, but that was known to myself and the people I was in school with as early as highschool. As a part of the landscape, like, yes you can pursue a career in academia but. Publish or perish, etc.
Seeing this, it applies everywhere including something as trivial as a retail job. I wonder if that’s why I too dislike that sort of backroom politicking so much.
Sabine Hossenfelder has a video on this problem.
I was thinking of this video as soon as I saw the post. She’s really an interesting person.
I think this is a very interesting take, but I am curious about how the career in youtube is better than the academia as she describes it.
Obviously, the discrimination against female and writing without proper acknowledgement is absolutely unacceptable, but I have never heard about anything like this in my field.
However, I feel like youtube is likely a more competitive landscape than grant writing. I think it is very likely the administrative overhead for youtuber is more than 15%, and youtuber needs to get the interest of people completely ignorant of the subject, not just experts, plus battling the unpredictbility of youtube algorithm.
Of course, I am not trying to downplay the problem she mentioned, but I am just wondering how youtube is a better alternative career, considering her goal to do “serious and innovative science”.
Lucky, not hero.
This is a person saying they don’t like what everyone else on the planet deals with daily.
Fortunately they were published enough to not have to care.
I’ve got bad news about…pretty much every career path.
Yeah, it’s an important skill to both be able to communicate your achievements and to be able to interpret achievements of others correctly (i.e. be able to see through their bs) in any job setting.
And this is actually a good thing that it’s taught at Penn, as it doesn’t lie to you and say, “just get high grades and you’ll be the best in the world!”
Would have been nice if my university taught us that
“bUt PaRtIcIpAtInG iN sOcIeTy!”, people with imposter syndrome who don’t believe enough in their own abilities to be comfortable with the idea of merit alone judging advancement.
My supervisor talked of Barnum and Bailey. He wasn’t wrong, but glad I got out.
Science should be a worthy endeavour, currently it’s not. Sell out for more…
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