[eli_gottlieb]

Well, the problem is that people so often go motte-and-bailey on it.

Motte: all the valid critiques of how institutional science works, all of which are well-known.

Bailey: full Paul Ryanism, cut the NSF and NIH to the fucking bone and tell scientists to go get "real jobs" in industry. Subject academics to yet more administration and reporting requirements that further incentivize bad science and just generally make everyone miserable.

We'd all be less tetchy about the motte if it wasn't used as an excuse for the bailey.

[spaceseaman]

Thank you explaining my frustration in such a clear way. My original response was so feral because I interpreted his comment as a criticism of all scientists and a call to change the current University system to something more "libertarian" (because those are arguments I'm frequently exposed to, and the comment I responded to appeared to dog-whistle similar ideas).

I am perfectly happy to admit that institutional science is screwed up - really bad. Scientific texts are often un-readable, and the entire community has major systemic issues. But I react incredibly poorly to the opinion that scientists enjoy this system or even benefit from it. We hate the way academia is structured. It's just that no one can figure out anything better and the benefits for enough people are important enough that swaying them is incredibly difficult.

[eli_gottlieb]

>We hate the way academia is structured. It's just that no one can figure out anything better and the benefits for enough people are important enough that swaying them is incredibly difficult.

It's also that everyone who wants to do science is held hostage to this system. There is no other institution focused on original research, beyond shipping a product within three to five years.

Academia sucks. There are no full-time research positions for good researchers anymore; grant funding has gotten as selective as the startup lottery. Even the people who "make it" have to work horrendous hours and spend all their time marketing themselves.

Even from the very outset, you're forced to put your heart on the line, declare science your calling and your passion, and then just suck it up when you can't find a tenure-track job.

Some fields don't have an "Exit" option that makes anything better, just a "Voice" option or bust. Besides which, every "Exit" is a betrayal of the social contract, a tiny declaration that society would rather rot and burn than fix problems like mature adults.