[dnautics]

well, when you do that, the second post-doc does the enzyme work, and doesn't notice one little thing that the first post-doc does that messes up the experiment, 30% of the time. It's like why do hospitals make doctors and nurses pull long shifts? One of the major sources of errors is handoff error, where passing a patient from continuous care by one person to another results in loss of experiential knowledge accumulated over that time, which is why medical staff tend to pull 16 hour shifts instead of 8 hour shifts (which would double the handoff error).

[projektir]

Yet we have a movement toward shorter hours for hospital staff right now due to all the errors committed by overworked people and burnout issues. Expecting mere humans to keep track of logistical things is already a mistake - use computers, use checklists, etc., medical issues due to expecting a human to remember things is already a problem. It's not like these policies are chosen by nurses themselves, they're chosen by those whom it does not affect.

I very much doubt that this reason you claim has been properly looked at. Every single time I look at a situation like this it never happens for a good reason, but because someone was greedy and was trying to cut costs somewhere. The main reason this gets written off as OK is because nobody cares about nurses, or post-docs, or whatever other group of exploited people. They're replaceable and interchangeable and are just thrown through the grinder because it's cheaper than figuring things out properly. The cost of burnout is never considered because the implementers can get away with not bearing it.

[dnautics]

16 hours is shorter than the past. I mean your exploitation rhetoric is very facile. For what it's worth, I think there are more postdocs exploiting the system than get exploited by the system. My personal feeling is that the median postdoc is worth negative science.

[projektir]

There's nothing facile about it, I'm not so filled with learned helplessness that I can't objectively look at 16 hours and say that it's too much without having to turn to an imaginary god and thank him that it's not 24 hours while standing on one leg.

When you are making use of a person's time and you are not properly compensating them, and the improper compensation is a result of a huge imbalance of power, incentives, and options, that is exploitation.

All bad systems are and will be exploited, that actually only confirms my argument. When bad systems exist, it's a signal that they're not actually doing useful work, and are miscalibrated and inefficient. These inefficiencies are then very easy to exploit by other parties, because the thing that we claim to value (good science) is false, and the thing we actually appear to value (doormatiness) is true, so it is not surprising at all that people who can appear doormatty are benefiting from this system and science has nothing to do with it. That's exactly what you set up! If you measured for the science, you'd detect the rest and kick them out in a short while.