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by bonoboTP
397 days ago
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The two are not as orthogonal as the cynical takes make it seem. This is also a bit like the idea that attractive people are less smart and vice versa, when the two are actually positively correlated. The people who won the career game at top US universities in technical fields don't simply get there by making their plots fancier or using the right words in the abstract in otherwise trivial papers. The papers do make valuable contributions. Pursuing research for pure personal discovery is great, but if you don't tell others about it, why should they care? Most discoveries are not General Relativity or Evolution. And there's also a component of "cope" in these lamentations. Oh, I'm a lone wolf genius, misunderstood by all, the contrarian who is rejected by the in-crowd yadda yadda because of career failure. It's a way to preserve ego. If only it wasn't for the social games, I'd be the next Einstein, my intentions are pure, while the establishment is rotten. It's a bit more nuanced than that. You have to do good work AND know how to present it and spread awareness about it. Both are needed. |
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I won't speak for anyone else but here are three things I think are all true:
* We live in a renaissance of academic research that is giving us profound scientific discovery
* Prioritizing a scientific career over scientific discovery can lead to a net positive of good scientific results, and, so far, has
* Prioritizing a scientific career over scientific discovery produces low quality science
Saying that people who know how to maneuver the political academic landscape, to secure a position, also produce valuable contributions might be true (I believe it is) but the argument doesn't address the cost of prioritizing, or promoting, that behavior.
I'm reminded of "The Economics of Superstars" [0]. If someone is "better" by a measure of 2x, say, but gets (10+)x the amount of resources, this is not a good allocation of energy. Saying that the 2x person should get more resources is true. Saying that they're justified in getting orders of magnitude more resources, at the cost of everyone else who might use them to better effect, is not.
These conversations are subtle. I notice that one of the common crutches is to attack people as "just being bitter". This seems like a cheap attack and I wish you and others would try to be more thoughtful.
[0] https://home.uchicago.edu/~vlima/courses/econ201/Superstars....