Would be interesting to read something about engineering degrees too. Are some degrees less worth pursuing? Is it sensible to spend 5 years if you're gonna become a PPT wizard ( sure good pay probably).
This is 100% true but by the early 1990s computer science Phds were ALSO in the shitter because of all the 1990 layoffs and the total shutdown of industrial basic research and so every industry CS PhD was trying to get a professorship job so they could continue to do research after all the researchers in industry had been laid off!!! Science is a pyramid scheme and a very shallow pyamid with 80-90% cuts at every level !!!
Computer science has become the worst profession of all now because all the OTHER scientists say, "it's okay if I can never have a career in a scientific field I'll just switch and become a computer scientist!" And most of them will work for food ...
I graduated in 1993 when there were 20 usa positions for the 1000 CS PhDs. "That's okay" you say? "How many were from top schools" you say? 200, thats how many PhDs were from top 10 schools ... So, 10:1, a 90% cut ...
I did get a tenure track job (outside the usa - in canada) but could not afford the incredibly low pay in the most expensive city in north america (income vs housing costs ratio).
Is it not? I'd assumed that the dramatic increase in people with doctorates was simply a mix of the new era of practically unlimited student loans, university being quite enjoyable, and a desire to avoid entering into the 'real world.' It's not like people are planning to become academics, but by the time somebody completes a doctorate in e.g. sociology, they're gonna be buried in a mountain of debt with relatively few career options.
Most doctorates are funded, at least in the sciences. There are certainly some people who go to grad school because it seems like the logical next step but they tend not to complete a PhD.
What he says is still correct for academics. There are too many candidates for too few positions. The pay is lousy. The hours are long. You don't really get to follow you best creative instincts. You spend an inordinate amount of time writing grants. Teaching, particularly pre-meds, can suck.
Now with Trump, the problem has only been compounded.
That isn't to say that there are no non-academic jobs for PhDs that can be satisfying. Just you may be a glorified engineer. No shame in that if that is what you want.
It feels like part of the problem is that society has failed to provide alternatives. There are two many academics for too few jobs. However, there aren't really alternatives for intellectually stimulating careers.
The oversupply has extended from phds down to bachelor's degrees. With 37% of Americans getting bachelor's degrees it doesn't mean anything anymore and is wasteful overtraining. I'm no Trumper but somebody has to stop the greedy life-wasting that academics have created by overfunding a lot of stupid duplicate research and excessive college educations by people who never have an impact...
Very few people say that. Overwhelmingly the rhetoric one hears is that the purpose of higher education is to get a better job.
Personally, I think it would be great if we educated people to cultivate an engaged citizenry. But if we're going to do that we have to be up-front about it an work on an economic model that supports it. So, for example, you can't have student loans that are predicated on being able to obtain a certain level of income on graduation, and you certainly can't make those loans impossible to discharge even in bankruptcy. If you lie about it, as we have been for decades now, it all unravels sooner or later.
It’s not very fashionable on HN because of the faux-tough utilitarian outlook, sure. I’m the real life, there might be such a thing as over-education, but the US are certainly not there.
You need to keep in mind context. He lived in a time when the overwhelming majority of society was self employed and there was no formalized, let alone compulsory, educational system whatsoever. Looking up the exact history there, the first compulsory education began in 1852 (Jefferson died in 1826 at the age of 83), where children 8 to 14 were required to spend at least 3 months a year in 'schooling', with at least 6 weeks of it being consecutive. [1]
And in the early 19th century near to 100% of Americans lived in rural areas where access to centralized information was minimal. There was no internet, radio, or other means of centralized communication. For that matter, there wasn't even electricity. The closest they'd have had would have been local newspapers. So people without any education would have had very little idea about the world around them.
And obviously I don't mean what's happening half-way around the world, but in their own country, their own rights, and so on. Among the political elite there was a raging battle over federalism vs confederalism, but that would have had very little meaning to the overwhelming majority of Americans. Jefferson won the presidency in 1800 with 45k votes against John Adams' 30k votes, when the country's population was 5,300,000!
Even into the 1950's and early 60's, my dad went to a one-room school, probably until he was around 14 years old. No running water or air conditioning, the job of the first student to arrive in colder months was to start a fire in the stove to heat up the room.
Had he been born a few years earlier, it would have been unlikely for him to even graduate. 1940 was the first year that the graduation rate hit 50%.
"I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs."
This seems a bit hyperbolic. In the mid to late 2000s, only 5 of the 15 close grad student friends I had at Caltech didn't get a tenure track position somewhere. Four of the five work in tech, and the fifth is a government electrical engineer. 4/5 were homegrown, the fifth is an immigrant, and all ten tenure track (now mostly tenured) profs are immigrants.
I can retrospectively look back at folks in my (non computer science) PhD cohort, and say that this bearish outlook is only true for folks who stay in science too long or pursue actual academic careers.
The vast majority of folks I know flipped into more lucrative careers in industry... some of which require PhDs or Masters degrees.
Furthermore, it really depends on your track. You can wind up in a lab studying something totally obscure or you can be in a lab with multi-million dollar funding and state-of-the-art equipment you can't find elsewhere.
Sadly the most well funded scientific research right now is actually being bankrolled by techbro oligarchs for tax deduction purposes, even more so with the cuts to US funding.
I'm a research scientist, and I think it's fine. Though it may vary with your country and time.
During my PhD, we learned that about 1 in 10 PhDs got a permanent academic position. That's intentional - the industry wants way more PhDs than the university. If we only trained future professors, we'd train many fewer.
But PhDs have low unemployment, even in subjects like history and philosophy, and the jobs they get in industry are usually good. So getting a PhD is not exactly the career suicide that people paint it as.
The author is right about the whole grant game though. Fuck that.
> So getting a PhD is not exactly the career suicide that people paint it as.
Even when it is not career suicide, it usually is a pay cut in real terms compared to getting a job at a company earlier and accumulating experience on the job.
The capitalist box is the best box there is, for better or worse.
It may also be worth pointing out that many of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in human history were either achieved before institutional science existed in a modern form, or were achieved outside the formal system. We may have been better off with a system in which science was left to a tiny elite of eccentric geniuses with academic freedom. It certainly doesn't seem as though society is bettered by cranking out 1,000 government funded PoliSci Phds each year.
I'm not sure that's really relevant. If capitalism fails to allow people to live worthwhile lives, then I don't think it helps much to say some other system is worse. That doesn't change the fact that capitalism is a failed system.
Exactly: when people are unhappy and decide they're going to remove the heads of the ruling class, "but <some other system> is worse!" is some gallows humor while they do it.
Which has historical precedent: the French revolution wasn't a well planned transition to a better system, the Russian revolutionaries overthrowing the Tsar weren't much interested in the specific details of communism.
If the defense you have for the suffering of people is "well it could be worse" you are rather gambling that they are not yet sufficiently unhappy that the effort to be rid of you won't seem worth it.
> "The capitalist box is the best box there is, for better or worse."
Only because on the whole we've been utterly resistant to every attempt to try any other way since inventing "<$money>". Bottomless greed is a real thing, and it's deeply dangerous to us all...
> Democratic socialism, also called social democracy, has been dramatically more effective than America's late stage capitalism.
> The heavily unionized capitalism that we had in the decades after WW2 also worked much better than our present system.
^^^ This. ^^^
What I'd really like to see is pick all the various bits and pieces from all the things that have been tried that do work well and try to build something around using those bits to build a solid foundation, using the mistakes of the past to learn from and avoid; not repeat ad-nauseam throughout history until it brings about our eventual end as a species. Clearly not gonna happen though. We're all too hell-bent on actively not seeing any sorta "big picture" future for humanity beyond "he who dies with the most money wins".
Ten years ago the cleaners in the labs at The University of Otago had job security most of the scientists could only dream about.
I was in the business school (very low rankings!) and I was amazed at the infighting, back stabbing and general lack of collegiality amongst the academic staff.
“The cleaners have job security the scientists could only dream of” is pithy, but is it actually saying much? Cleaning is an essential, low-prestige, and potentially quite unpleasant job… I bet the cleaner is the most secure job in a lot of places.
What it boils down to is that these are fields with a supply glut of people and/or product.
My take is: never try to enter such a field unless you really think you have a chance at performing in the top 20% of all entrants in that field. Anything else is a dice roll. A few people get lucky, but statistically it won’t be you.
Discouraging people from trying is a good filter for these fields, since the only people who will ignore such advice is people who really deeply love it or are really driven. Those are the people most likely to ascend to the top 20%. Nobody gets that good at something they aren’t driven to do.
It’s also a way to maybe make things better for people in those fields in the future. If the only people who enter the field are those who are deeply driven, it might cut down on the overpopulation problem.
Edit: some fields are worse than others of course. Glance at up and coming Hollywood actors and actresses for a worst case. Of the ones who are not nepo babies, look into how much work and hustle and luck (combined) it took for them to make it. Most are insanely good looking talented people who started acting as kids and hustled for years and then got lucky. It’s wild.
Physics is not that bad, but it’s not great. Fiction writing might be that bad, especially since the money is less even if someone does make it.
Unfortunately, I met a lot of people in graduate school who were in that top 20% in terms of their ability in their discipline. But they were on a collision course with expectations of employers for what kinds of work they were interested in. The conventional wisdom is you got a science PhD because you want to be an outgoing, driven, competitive leader. And they may have been treating the academe as a shelter from those expectations too.
I think it could be better titled "Don't Become an Academic Professional or Professional Scientist." They have good reasons for this.
Whereas, you can do science as a hobby in your spare time for free or up to your chosen budget. You can publish whatever you want on your web sites, social media, etc. You can often get advice or peer review from professional scientists by asking them. You might pay them for their time if you feel your work was worth it.
I came to a similar conclusion as a computer scientist working in industry who ended up transitioning to a community college teaching career. I remember being inspired by the stories of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC as a high school student and undergrad, wanting to follow in the footsteps of researchers like Dennis Ritchie. However, the industrial research landscape has changed in the past 15 years. It's very difficult to find truly curiosity-driven places with long timelines and little pressure, and industrial researchers these days are pressured to work on projects with more immediate productization prospects. I've seen this firsthand at a few companies. The tenure-track at a research university route requires playing the "publish-or-perish" game, which is also a curb on freedom and is also filled with pressure.
Being a tenure-track professor at a California community college is a happy situation for me. I love teaching, and for roughly 8 months of the year I'm dedicated to teaching. Tenure at my community college is entirely based on teaching and service; I'm not required (or even expected) to publish. I also get roughly 4 months of the year off (three months off in the summer, one month off in the winter). I spent much of the past summer in Japan collaborating with a professor on research. The only serious downside is not being able to afford a house within a reasonable commute from work, but I had the same problem in industry; not everyone in industry makes FAANG-level salaries. In fact, my compensation is effectively a raise from my previous job when factoring in going from roughly 3 weeks of PTO per year to 4 months off plus 10 days worth of sick leave; I took a roughly 10% pay cut in exchange for greater freedom and roughly 5-6x the annual time off.
I've learned that being a hobbyist researcher with a stable job that provides summers off is quite a favorable situation, since I don't have to worry about my job security being tied to my publication and fund-raising counts. Most of my computer science research can be done on a mid-range laptop with an Internet connection and access to textbooks and academic databases; I don't need equipment that cost five- or six-figures (though it would be nice to have a GPU cluster....).
Bell Labs was part of AT&T which had in effect a government approved monopoly -- nearly all of the US telephone system, so was awash in earnings for transistors, lasers, information theory, the Fast Fourier Transform, etc. Xerox PARC was part of Xerox that was also "awash in earnings" from photocopying machines and for more whatever else, e.g., more in personal computing.
So, for a high school student, the lesson there was not just to do great science but to join or start a business that is or soon can be "awash in money" and then do whatever you want, e.g., Jim and Marilyn Simons, including "great science".
In more detail, now in practice, one of the main motivations of a company "awash in money" is to pursue research for luster, e.g., AI, quantum computing.
> you can do science as a hobby in your spare time for free or up to your chosen budget
Not in many fields/subfields, unless "chosen budget" is some unattainable amount of disposable income.
Most people who want to do science have a specific field they are interested in. Your proposal is fine for theoreticians (and some computationalists, depending on the compute they require), but not many others.
This is like saying you can study CS using pen and paper. It’s possible for certain rare edge cases but absolutely nobody is going through the process of applying for grants if they don’t need the money to work on the problems they’ve specialized for. People in the past were just as smart and motivated so the low-hanging fruit is gone.
Even for fields that can be done entirely with pen and paper, grad students and postdocs don't work for free, and often the only way a professor can keep up with a research university's publication expectations is to hire grad students and postdocs to contribute to research. Grants help pay for their stipends. Additionally, there are many universities that require their professors to raise grant money as a condition of tenure, since grant money is a significant source of revenue for research universities.
Feels to me a combination of old web with new web tricks is the key. People used to update obscure hobby details but there really was no way to donate. Creators didn't even think to bother to ask. All this democratization talk seems to be the solution.
I don't think crowdfunding is a good funding source for science in general. Crowdfunding's going to overemphasize already popular and easy to explain science at the expense of everything else. Boring sounding and unfamiliar stuff like the research I'd like to do would not succeed.
I disagree. There's a guy that doesn't have much attention that's creating fuel from burning plastic. He got crowdfunded. I also recall finding a website way back when of a dude that explored the old railroad tunnels of downtown Chicago. I would have 100% funded that guy for content.
He gets $36K from about 800 donors for a project that seems pretty easy to explain ("creating fuel from burning plastic") and is something probably millions of people are interested in. Wikipedia says he has millions of followers!
The stuff I'd like to do would probably not have even 800 people interested in it after I carefully explained it. And $36K is not a lot when it comes to experimental research in the physical world.
In my view, working a day job and taking periodic sabbaticals would have better ROI for this guy and myself.
> "Boring sounding and unfamiliar stuff like the research I'd like to do would not succeed."
"Boring sounding" to anyone who don't have a "passion" for that particular area of science as you must if you're wanting to research it. The (hard) trick is to get your crowdfunding request in front of the specific eyeballs that will understand (and be excited by) your motivations and interests enough to want to finance advancing that research.
I don't know from where I sit "don't be a crank" might be better advice.
Not to say it's impossible to do science as a hobby (there's some good stuff coming out of e.g. the ham community and amateur astronomers), but sadly most of my interactions with "hobbyist scientists" have been crackpots (ok, there is some selection bias here, crackpots go to all sorts of lengths to try to contact you).
The same timestamp at the bottom of the essay can be found on other pages by Professor Katz, such as his list of publications which includes papers from 2019. I suspect that the timestamp of 1999 is incorrect.
While this is clearly an old post, I'm not sure about the actual date. On the bottom it says 1999, but there's also a citation for an article from 2001.
> For many more details consult the Young Scientists' Network or read the account in the May, 2001 issue of the Washington Monthly.
Would be interesting to read something about engineering degrees too. Are some degrees less worth pursuing? Is it sensible to spend 5 years if you're gonna become a PPT wizard ( sure good pay probably).
This is 100% true but by the early 1990s computer science Phds were ALSO in the shitter because of all the 1990 layoffs and the total shutdown of industrial basic research and so every industry CS PhD was trying to get a professorship job so they could continue to do research after all the researchers in industry had been laid off!!! Science is a pyramid scheme and a very shallow pyamid with 80-90% cuts at every level !!!
Computer science has become the worst profession of all now because all the OTHER scientists say, "it's okay if I can never have a career in a scientific field I'll just switch and become a computer scientist!" And most of them will work for food ...
I graduated in 1993 when there were 20 usa positions for the 1000 CS PhDs. "That's okay" you say? "How many were from top schools" you say? 200, thats how many PhDs were from top 10 schools ... So, 10:1, a 90% cut ...
I did get a tenure track job (outside the usa - in canada) but could not afford the incredibly low pay in the most expensive city in north america (income vs housing costs ratio).
Vancouver mentioned!
Those interested in the article may also enjoy reading this one, which really helps to sober your perspective on why one would even go for a CS PhD:
“So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.!” a.k.a. “Everything I wanted to know about C.S. graduate school at the beginning but didn’t learn until later.”
https://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html
Scientist here. It's certainly not always an easy path, but if it's what you want, it's what you want. It's not something you fall into though...
Is it not? I'd assumed that the dramatic increase in people with doctorates was simply a mix of the new era of practically unlimited student loans, university being quite enjoyable, and a desire to avoid entering into the 'real world.' It's not like people are planning to become academics, but by the time somebody completes a doctorate in e.g. sociology, they're gonna be buried in a mountain of debt with relatively few career options.
Most doctorates are funded, at least in the sciences. There are certainly some people who go to grad school because it seems like the logical next step but they tend not to complete a PhD.
What he says is still correct for academics. There are too many candidates for too few positions. The pay is lousy. The hours are long. You don't really get to follow you best creative instincts. You spend an inordinate amount of time writing grants. Teaching, particularly pre-meds, can suck. Now with Trump, the problem has only been compounded. That isn't to say that there are no non-academic jobs for PhDs that can be satisfying. Just you may be a glorified engineer. No shame in that if that is what you want.
It feels like part of the problem is that society has failed to provide alternatives. There are two many academics for too few jobs. However, there aren't really alternatives for intellectually stimulating careers.
The oversupply has extended from phds down to bachelor's degrees. With 37% of Americans getting bachelor's degrees it doesn't mean anything anymore and is wasteful overtraining. I'm no Trumper but somebody has to stop the greedy life-wasting that academics have created by overfunding a lot of stupid duplicate research and excessive college educations by people who never have an impact...
Some would say you educate people to cultivate an engaged citizenry
Very few people say that. Overwhelmingly the rhetoric one hears is that the purpose of higher education is to get a better job.
Personally, I think it would be great if we educated people to cultivate an engaged citizenry. But if we're going to do that we have to be up-front about it an work on an economic model that supports it. So, for example, you can't have student loans that are predicated on being able to obtain a certain level of income on graduation, and you certainly can't make those loans impossible to discharge even in bankruptcy. If you lie about it, as we have been for decades now, it all unravels sooner or later.
> Very few people say that.
It’s not very fashionable on HN because of the faux-tough utilitarian outlook, sure. I’m the real life, there might be such a thing as over-education, but the US are certainly not there.
Thomas Jefferson said that a bunch
Thomas Jefferson was one person, and he died over 200 years ago.
You need to keep in mind context. He lived in a time when the overwhelming majority of society was self employed and there was no formalized, let alone compulsory, educational system whatsoever. Looking up the exact history there, the first compulsory education began in 1852 (Jefferson died in 1826 at the age of 83), where children 8 to 14 were required to spend at least 3 months a year in 'schooling', with at least 6 weeks of it being consecutive. [1]
And in the early 19th century near to 100% of Americans lived in rural areas where access to centralized information was minimal. There was no internet, radio, or other means of centralized communication. For that matter, there wasn't even electricity. The closest they'd have had would have been local newspapers. So people without any education would have had very little idea about the world around them.
And obviously I don't mean what's happening half-way around the world, but in their own country, their own rights, and so on. Among the political elite there was a raging battle over federalism vs confederalism, but that would have had very little meaning to the overwhelming majority of Americans. Jefferson won the presidency in 1800 with 45k votes against John Adams' 30k votes, when the country's population was 5,300,000!
[1] - https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/history-publ...
Even into the 1950's and early 60's, my dad went to a one-room school, probably until he was around 14 years old. No running water or air conditioning, the job of the first student to arrive in colder months was to start a fire in the stove to heat up the room.
Had he been born a few years earlier, it would have been unlikely for him to even graduate. 1940 was the first year that the graduation rate hit 50%.
Previously on HN:
Don't Become a Scientist (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789844 - Aug 2018 (2 comments)
Don't Become a Scientist (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836622 - July 2015 (4 comments)
Don't become a scientist (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8702841 - Dec 2014 (33 comments)
Don't Become a Scientist (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7763737 - May 2014 (159 comments)
"I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs."
This seems a bit hyperbolic. In the mid to late 2000s, only 5 of the 15 close grad student friends I had at Caltech didn't get a tenure track position somewhere. Four of the five work in tech, and the fifth is a government electrical engineer. 4/5 were homegrown, the fifth is an immigrant, and all ten tenure track (now mostly tenured) profs are immigrants.
Maybe he just doesn’t know many people whose life was ruined by drugs.
To be fair, Caltech is a top school for physics.
I can retrospectively look back at folks in my (non computer science) PhD cohort, and say that this bearish outlook is only true for folks who stay in science too long or pursue actual academic careers.
The vast majority of folks I know flipped into more lucrative careers in industry... some of which require PhDs or Masters degrees.
Furthermore, it really depends on your track. You can wind up in a lab studying something totally obscure or you can be in a lab with multi-million dollar funding and state-of-the-art equipment you can't find elsewhere.
Sadly the most well funded scientific research right now is actually being bankrolled by techbro oligarchs for tax deduction purposes, even more so with the cuts to US funding.
> Sadly the most well funded scientific research right now is actually being bankrolled by techbro oligarchs for tax deduction purposes
What’s an example?
I'm a research scientist, and I think it's fine. Though it may vary with your country and time.
During my PhD, we learned that about 1 in 10 PhDs got a permanent academic position. That's intentional - the industry wants way more PhDs than the university. If we only trained future professors, we'd train many fewer.
But PhDs have low unemployment, even in subjects like history and philosophy, and the jobs they get in industry are usually good. So getting a PhD is not exactly the career suicide that people paint it as.
The author is right about the whole grant game though. Fuck that.
> So getting a PhD is not exactly the career suicide that people paint it as.
Even when it is not career suicide, it usually is a pay cut in real terms compared to getting a job at a company earlier and accumulating experience on the job.
A family friend who has a PhD in math told us that PhD stands for Permanent Head Damage
I wonder if this is a parallel trap for people who study PoliSci and want to go into government to make a difference.
Regardless, each career has a disillusionment curve — although yes in this case the financial reality of it (still is) is super unfortunate.
If I had to guess, probably mostly because it doesn’t fit in a nice capitalist box of money in / money out.
The capitalist box is the best box there is, for better or worse.
It may also be worth pointing out that many of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in human history were either achieved before institutional science existed in a modern form, or were achieved outside the formal system. We may have been better off with a system in which science was left to a tiny elite of eccentric geniuses with academic freedom. It certainly doesn't seem as though society is bettered by cranking out 1,000 government funded PoliSci Phds each year.
It's certainly an effective lawnmower, I just wish it didn't run over so many feet!
Capitalism has created a hell world where anything that makes life worth living has long since been stripped for profit.
You should read about the history of communism. Until you do, you have no idea how utterly horrible life can get.
Capitalism will be completely eliminated, I don't think it has even 50 years left.
I'm not sure that's really relevant. If capitalism fails to allow people to live worthwhile lives, then I don't think it helps much to say some other system is worse. That doesn't change the fact that capitalism is a failed system.
Exactly: when people are unhappy and decide they're going to remove the heads of the ruling class, "but <some other system> is worse!" is some gallows humor while they do it.
Which has historical precedent: the French revolution wasn't a well planned transition to a better system, the Russian revolutionaries overthrowing the Tsar weren't much interested in the specific details of communism.
If the defense you have for the suffering of people is "well it could be worse" you are rather gambling that they are not yet sufficiently unhappy that the effort to be rid of you won't seem worth it.
> "The capitalist box is the best box there is, for better or worse."
Only because on the whole we've been utterly resistant to every attempt to try any other way since inventing "<$money>". Bottomless greed is a real thing, and it's deeply dangerous to us all...
Many other ways have been tried. They have been abject failures with a little mass murder, famine, and war for bonus points!
Is there some way you're thinking of that has not been tried?
Democratic socialism, also called social democracy, has been dramatically more effective than America's late stage capitalism.
The heavily unionized capitalism that we had in the decades after WW2 also worked much better than our present system.
Someone should do the super duper hard work of figuring out what it was exactly that changed and made that stop working.
> has been dramatically more effective than America's late stage capitalism.
Depends on how you look at it, and which categories you measure, obviously? Why hasn't it caught on other than Nordic countries?
> Democratic socialism, also called social democracy, has been dramatically more effective than America's late stage capitalism.
> The heavily unionized capitalism that we had in the decades after WW2 also worked much better than our present system.
^^^ This. ^^^
What I'd really like to see is pick all the various bits and pieces from all the things that have been tried that do work well and try to build something around using those bits to build a solid foundation, using the mistakes of the past to learn from and avoid; not repeat ad-nauseam throughout history until it brings about our eventual end as a species. Clearly not gonna happen though. We're all too hell-bent on actively not seeing any sorta "big picture" future for humanity beyond "he who dies with the most money wins".
If we depend on the stupid, they'll keep repeating "this is the best system ever" until we have all being destroyed.
Wow, and things have gotten even worse in academia over the last 25 years.
Has anything changed for the better?
Ten years ago the cleaners in the labs at The University of Otago had job security most of the scientists could only dream about.
I was in the business school (very low rankings!) and I was amazed at the infighting, back stabbing and general lack of collegiality amongst the academic staff.
I could not wait together out of there
“The cleaners have job security the scientists could only dream of” is pithy, but is it actually saying much? Cleaning is an essential, low-prestige, and potentially quite unpleasant job… I bet the cleaner is the most secure job in a lot of places.
Not really because there’s an oversupply of people that will do it and petulant bosses
This reminds me of numerous pieces I’ve read by authors on why not to try to become an author, like this: https://www.elysian.press/p/publishing-industry-truth
What it boils down to is that these are fields with a supply glut of people and/or product.
My take is: never try to enter such a field unless you really think you have a chance at performing in the top 20% of all entrants in that field. Anything else is a dice roll. A few people get lucky, but statistically it won’t be you.
Discouraging people from trying is a good filter for these fields, since the only people who will ignore such advice is people who really deeply love it or are really driven. Those are the people most likely to ascend to the top 20%. Nobody gets that good at something they aren’t driven to do.
It’s also a way to maybe make things better for people in those fields in the future. If the only people who enter the field are those who are deeply driven, it might cut down on the overpopulation problem.
Edit: some fields are worse than others of course. Glance at up and coming Hollywood actors and actresses for a worst case. Of the ones who are not nepo babies, look into how much work and hustle and luck (combined) it took for them to make it. Most are insanely good looking talented people who started acting as kids and hustled for years and then got lucky. It’s wild.
Physics is not that bad, but it’s not great. Fiction writing might be that bad, especially since the money is less even if someone does make it.
Unfortunately, I met a lot of people in graduate school who were in that top 20% in terms of their ability in their discipline. But they were on a collision course with expectations of employers for what kinds of work they were interested in. The conventional wisdom is you got a science PhD because you want to be an outgoing, driven, competitive leader. And they may have been treating the academe as a shelter from those expectations too.
I think it could be better titled "Don't Become an Academic Professional or Professional Scientist." They have good reasons for this.
Whereas, you can do science as a hobby in your spare time for free or up to your chosen budget. You can publish whatever you want on your web sites, social media, etc. You can often get advice or peer review from professional scientists by asking them. You might pay them for their time if you feel your work was worth it.
I came to a similar conclusion as a computer scientist working in industry who ended up transitioning to a community college teaching career. I remember being inspired by the stories of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC as a high school student and undergrad, wanting to follow in the footsteps of researchers like Dennis Ritchie. However, the industrial research landscape has changed in the past 15 years. It's very difficult to find truly curiosity-driven places with long timelines and little pressure, and industrial researchers these days are pressured to work on projects with more immediate productization prospects. I've seen this firsthand at a few companies. The tenure-track at a research university route requires playing the "publish-or-perish" game, which is also a curb on freedom and is also filled with pressure.
Being a tenure-track professor at a California community college is a happy situation for me. I love teaching, and for roughly 8 months of the year I'm dedicated to teaching. Tenure at my community college is entirely based on teaching and service; I'm not required (or even expected) to publish. I also get roughly 4 months of the year off (three months off in the summer, one month off in the winter). I spent much of the past summer in Japan collaborating with a professor on research. The only serious downside is not being able to afford a house within a reasonable commute from work, but I had the same problem in industry; not everyone in industry makes FAANG-level salaries. In fact, my compensation is effectively a raise from my previous job when factoring in going from roughly 3 weeks of PTO per year to 4 months off plus 10 days worth of sick leave; I took a roughly 10% pay cut in exchange for greater freedom and roughly 5-6x the annual time off.
I've learned that being a hobbyist researcher with a stable job that provides summers off is quite a favorable situation, since I don't have to worry about my job security being tied to my publication and fund-raising counts. Most of my computer science research can be done on a mid-range laptop with an Internet connection and access to textbooks and academic databases; I don't need equipment that cost five- or six-figures (though it would be nice to have a GPU cluster....).
Bell Labs was part of AT&T which had in effect a government approved monopoly -- nearly all of the US telephone system, so was awash in earnings for transistors, lasers, information theory, the Fast Fourier Transform, etc. Xerox PARC was part of Xerox that was also "awash in earnings" from photocopying machines and for more whatever else, e.g., more in personal computing.
So, for a high school student, the lesson there was not just to do great science but to join or start a business that is or soon can be "awash in money" and then do whatever you want, e.g., Jim and Marilyn Simons, including "great science".
In more detail, now in practice, one of the main motivations of a company "awash in money" is to pursue research for luster, e.g., AI, quantum computing.
Ah, Lesson 101 in US life and money!
> you can do science as a hobby in your spare time for free or up to your chosen budget
Not in many fields/subfields, unless "chosen budget" is some unattainable amount of disposable income.
Most people who want to do science have a specific field they are interested in. Your proposal is fine for theoreticians (and some computationalists, depending on the compute they require), but not many others.
Biology can be studied by observing outside in any park.
This is like saying you can study CS using pen and paper. It’s possible for certain rare edge cases but absolutely nobody is going through the process of applying for grants if they don’t need the money to work on the problems they’ve specialized for. People in the past were just as smart and motivated so the low-hanging fruit is gone.
Even for fields that can be done entirely with pen and paper, grad students and postdocs don't work for free, and often the only way a professor can keep up with a research university's publication expectations is to hire grad students and postdocs to contribute to research. Grants help pay for their stipends. Additionally, there are many universities that require their professors to raise grant money as a condition of tenure, since grant money is a significant source of revenue for research universities.
Feels to me a combination of old web with new web tricks is the key. People used to update obscure hobby details but there really was no way to donate. Creators didn't even think to bother to ask. All this democratization talk seems to be the solution.
I don't think crowdfunding is a good funding source for science in general. Crowdfunding's going to overemphasize already popular and easy to explain science at the expense of everything else. Boring sounding and unfamiliar stuff like the research I'd like to do would not succeed.
I disagree. There's a guy that doesn't have much attention that's creating fuel from burning plastic. He got crowdfunded. I also recall finding a website way back when of a dude that explored the old railroad tunnels of downtown Chicago. I would have 100% funded that guy for content.
This guy?
https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-solarpowered-plastic-to-f...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Brown_(influencer)
He gets $36K from about 800 donors for a project that seems pretty easy to explain ("creating fuel from burning plastic") and is something probably millions of people are interested in. Wikipedia says he has millions of followers!
The stuff I'd like to do would probably not have even 800 people interested in it after I carefully explained it. And $36K is not a lot when it comes to experimental research in the physical world.
In my view, working a day job and taking periodic sabbaticals would have better ROI for this guy and myself.
> "Boring sounding and unfamiliar stuff like the research I'd like to do would not succeed."
"Boring sounding" to anyone who don't have a "passion" for that particular area of science as you must if you're wanting to research it. The (hard) trick is to get your crowdfunding request in front of the specific eyeballs that will understand (and be excited by) your motivations and interests enough to want to finance advancing that research.
I don't know from where I sit "don't be a crank" might be better advice.
Not to say it's impossible to do science as a hobby (there's some good stuff coming out of e.g. the ham community and amateur astronomers), but sadly most of my interactions with "hobbyist scientists" have been crackpots (ok, there is some selection bias here, crackpots go to all sorts of lengths to try to contact you).
(1999)
The first copy of this essay captured by the Internet Archive was in October of 2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20011013031756/http://wuphys.wus...
The same timestamp at the bottom of the essay can be found on other pages by Professor Katz, such as his list of publications which includes papers from 2019. I suspect that the timestamp of 1999 is incorrect.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191206233227/https://web.physi...
While this is clearly an old post, I'm not sure about the actual date. On the bottom it says 1999, but there's also a citation for an article from 2001.
> For many more details consult the Young Scientists' Network or read the account in the May, 2001 issue of the Washington Monthly.
Being a physics researcher he built a time machine and in late 2001 went back in time to post it.