[j7ake]

Your suggestion would have fewer fresh eyes to look at the problem. If the scientific enterprise were just about churning out widgets, then yes it’s better to have permanent staff.

But having a strong training pipeline for the globe is a huge plus for US prestige, and the top people are still offered jobs as faculty or industry within the country, so it still a net gain for USA. But it’s brutally competitive for the individual scientists

[MostlyStable]

While I'm more skeptical than you are of the value of a string of new students coming through as opposed to just keeping the very best students, I'm also not suggesting we mandate this change or force it. I'm suggesting that we give people more information to make better informed decisions. If students decide that they are comfortable with a sub 20% job placement rate, then great, nothing needs to change. If they aren't satisfied with that, and we decide that actually they were performing a valuable service, then it behoovs society to pay them enough that they becoming willing to make that gamble again.

The current information assymetry is exploitative. One of two things would happen under my proposed system: either nothing would change because students think they are getting a good deal as is or students don't think the deal is worth it which means that the current system only works because students are having the reality of the job market hidden from them.

[kelipso]

AI in industry was basically made my PhD grads. Without that pipeline, there would be no AI, and I am not exaggerating much at all.

[j7ake]

I think a mix of the current system with more permanent researchers makes sense.

There is a lot of work in research that fits the permanent worker better than the fresh 22 year old. But having that fresh talent is really beneficial to science.

[aleph_minus_one]

> If students decide that they are comfortable with a sub 20% job placement rate, then great, nothing needs to change.

The problem is in my opinion not this low job placement rate per se (it is very easy to find out that this is the case for basically every prospective researcher). The problem rather is the "politics" involved in filling these positions, and additionally the fact that positions are commonly filled by what is currently "fashionable". If you, for some (often good) reason, did good research in an area that simply did not become "fashionable": good luck finding an academic position.

[godelski]

  > Your suggestion would have fewer fresh eyes to look at the problem

Why? That paradigm doesn't change the influx of new students.

But the current system has a problem of training people for a job and then sending them to do something else. Even a professorship is a very different job than a graduate researcher or postdoc. Most professors do little research themselves these days, instead managing research. Don't you think that's a little odd, not to mention wasteful? We definitely should have managers, and managers with research backgrounds themselves, but why not let people continue honing their research skills?

  > it’s brutally competitive for the individual scientists

It is. But this is also a social choice dictated by how much we as a country want to fund research.

[cafebeen]

In a practical sense, I would argue the scientific is primarily about churning out grants and papers.

[beepbooptheory]

Thats interesting, I don't know if I have ever seen this kind of labor market logic applied to science before. Is this an agreed upon idea? In my mind, science and the kind of focused research it entails is kind of definitionally distinct from something like "innovation." Like, frankly, yes, I want a stream of widgets; if that means consistent units of research done to contribute to an important area/problem, which are reviewed and judged by peers.

Like what's even the alternative? We want a Steve Jobs of science? That's really what we are going for?

[j7ake]

Are you suggesting science and innovation are distinct?

Scientific progress is largely driven by the “Steve Jobs” of sciences.

Only a tiny fraction of papers remain relevant. So that means the quality of the average paper doesn’t matter as much as the quality of the best paper.

[atrettel]

There is actually a lot of debate as to whether scientific discovery is driven by "heroes and geniuses" (as you argue) or by multiple people simultaneously and independently coming up with the same idea [1], often called "multiple discovery". Certainly both have occurred many times over.

That said, multiple discovery seems to be more common nowadays due to the rapid diffusion of information, which means that most people are operating in roughly the same information environment (initial conditions) when they start their research. It is interesting how often multiple discovery happens when you start to look closely at this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery