[Kenji]

Sure, this kind of pressure from an advisor breaks labor laws, but a postdoc is going to do this anyways because their contract is short-term, and if they don't rack up an achivement in that time, they're either have to be 1) lucky 2) a superstar, or 3) going to be kicked to the curb in terms of finding future employment.

Living under a bridge would be better than enduring this kind of stress. People have to take a step back and look at their lives. Nobody can work so much consistently without mentally and/or physically damaging themselves in significant and lasting ways.

[dnautics]

To say nobody can do that is overgeneralization. Some people can (A surprising number of scientists are ultramarathon runners). But also, a lot of people going through the scientists do wind up mentally damaged, and many of them become PIs.

[projektir]

I believe it's extremely harmful for science to assume that the only people who can contribute meaningful science are those that a) put up with awful work conditions and b) can be ultramarathon runners. You don't see a problem with that selection process? Does that correlation not alarm you?

May want to consider how many people would not have survived that kind of environment.

[dnautics]

I think you're missing the deep cynicism there. I don't think the stress or long hours can be done away with, but there are ways that the reward can be made worth it. I don't think that the monetary situation can be changed by fiat. The problem there is that there is an oversupply of labor, and trying to wave a magic wand to fix (monetary) compensation without recognizing the supply/demand curve is going to cause problems: Namely, that the demand for scientists will go down, and the promotion of scientists will become increasingly arbitrary. Instead of getting better scientists, we'll be paying a smaller number of bad scientists more money.

[projektir]

I'm just suspicious, because I've seen the "we NEED to work this many hours" argument so many times, in so many different fields, in so many different situations that I generally suspect it to be a reflexive response rather than a real reason. There's a giant propaganda machine out there running right now to convince everyone that hard work is the purpose of mankind.

The only situations I've seen where this was actually true is some extremely esoteric ones like certain military occupations and some emergency services. Even then, a lot of the time you can still use shifts, or reorganize the system entirely.

In fact, an oversupply of labor should have made the time problem evaporate. I've seen what some students waste their time on sometimes and it made me seriously scratch my head. I think part of the problem is that nobody is really looking for good labor, which is why there's so much for it. You're not going to get "special forces" people here, like Musk likes to pretend, because that number is so low they have other things to attract them. You'll get people who lost their self-respect somewhere and who will sit pointlessly for too long before they realize how much time they're wasting, burn out, and leave. They're often looking for people who will agree to sit there 24/7 and be the professor's little servants, rather than actually trying to screen for scientific ability. People who are actually as amazingly good as everyone claims scientists should be prefer to work on their own terms, they would never allow someone to boss them around and put time constraints.

There's an oversupply of labor, but I think that oversupply is already not very high quality at this point due to the fact that you are treated better and paid more in private industries. So, I disagree with you, treating people better would actually result in better people going back in and some work actually getting done, and treating people better, as in, paying them more and being more cognizant of their time, would also put an incentive on the payers to be careful with what they throw their money on so they're not going to think it's OK to waste a PhD's time to go grocery shopping (professional housekeeping is a thing, if you want some of that, maybe hire some. Oh, too expensive? Yeah, that's how much you're underpaying the PhD).

[dnautics]

You're right, that a lot of grad students whittle away at time doing stupid things. But your logical arrow is pointing the wrong way. Except in some fields (NMR: pop your sample in the machine and go surfing for seven days) I haven't seen a successful student who didn't spend a lot of hours working on things. A lot of grad students wasting time and being unsuccessful doesn't mean that being successful doesn't require not wasting time.

An oversupply of labor should have made the time problem evaporate.

Exactly. It didn't. That suggests the time problem is resistant to labor parallelization.

I think that oversupply is already not very high quality at this point due to the fact that you are treated better and paid more in private industries.

You're correct that the oversupply is not very high quality. But it's not because people are treated better in private industry. How many grad students quit mid-gradschool because "private industry pays better". How many postdocs quit mid-postdoc because "private industry pays better"? The market won't correct for this so easily because of several reasons. 1) the government incentivises the hiring of grad students and postdocs and channeling labor into that market 2) there is a narrative disconnect where professors don't give the 'real story' to people intending to pursue an academic career, partly because they are disincentivised to do so (see 1) and partly because there's selection bias (they got lucky, but don't realize it, and think that anyone can and should do what they can do) and 3) there's an irrational prestige drive that channels labor into this pool. How much propaganda do you see that science is awesome! And science is cool! And I fucking love science! And how much propaganda do you see that the life of a scientist is miserable, shitty, and doesn't pay well?