This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link