[sndean]

> You hold postdocs strictly to labor laws, and they are going to be at a disadvantage to the postdocs that are crazy enough to do what needs to be done. You hold all postdocs strictly to labor laws, and hard science simply doesn't happen.

I experienced this as a grad student, too. You essentially were at a disadvantage if you had a social life.

But you can extend this all the way down to high schoolers (or before?), where the kids out partying/socializing would be at a disadvantage to the kid studying alone in his room.

[Someone]

All the way down to kindergarten. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-china-schools-6ccb...:

"When Doudou Wong from Shanghai was four, she began attending additional math, Chinese, and English classes outside of her weekday kindergarten"

[pjlegato]

And the worst part: This sort of draconian training regimen doesn't even work. If it did, China would have far more Nobel Prizes than it does.

[yyhhsj0521]

It works [1]. The problem is that Nobel Prize has little to do with kindergarten and average people.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/03/pisa-r...

[Noseshine]

Test scores are a strange definition of "it works" in the given context.

[ken47]

Why are you assuming that the goal of the regimen is to produce Nobel Prizes?

[madengr]

Wow, that's f'd up.

[sjg007]

It actually goes all the way down to the womb and then to conception.

[imjustsaying]

Shanghai is completely different from the rest of China.

Comparing Shanghai education to US education is like comparing the best school district in the US to the average school district of China.

As with many things the communists parade around, you will be shown the front gates, but you won't be shown anything past it lest you realize you're seeing the facade of a movie set.

[simonh]

Parents paying for their children to get additional lessons to get an educational advantage isn't something you'll see 'communists parading around'. In fact the article makes it clear that the official position is that kindergarten teaching should be low pressure and using cramming classes is discouraged.

[dnautics]

> You essentially were at a disadvantage if you had a social life.

I actually think that is an incorrect myth. You can have a social life, you just have to pick social activities that are compatible with the grueling schedule. For example, I took up social dancing, which meets with a regular weekly pattern, and I was able to plan my experiments around it.

If you expect to have nonscientist friends that want to impromptu go out all weekend every weekend, well, that's maybe not going to happen, but I think that a lot of scientists use the process as an excuse to justify their social anxiety - the causal arrow here is in the wrong direction.

[sndean]

> You can have a social life, you just have to pick social activities that are compatible with the grueling schedule.

This was something I was never able to find. Maybe it was just me trying to justify my social anxiety, but the alternative to being in the lab always seemed to be all-night benders or similar. Envious you were able to find something. I should've been more proactive.

[dnautics]

I was lucky enough to a postdoc pull me aside and say, "look you need to not be that guy" and pointed to another postdoc that was... embarassing. Scared the shit out of me. Up till that point in my life all of my social engagements had been handed to me on a platter (high school, and esp. college), and although I'm a social person, it was very good rude awakening to tell me that I had to work for what I wanted in life.

[jwatte]

Except if they create social connections that last, because social connections are a better predictor of success than raw academics.