publically funded research should be published in a national journal/archive and made available to the citizen, it was funded with tax money and should be made available to the tax payer
All universities should offer a first-year elective course called "The University" that explains the university in its social, historical, political, and economic context - so students have at least some formal understanding of what they're actually getting themselves into.
That is called critical university studies which perhaps because of low self critical capacity is hardly present in universities and university research, left leaning politically biased unbalanced approach would be another problem if actually implemented, but there is a slow meltdown with rising tuition student debt online alternatives, low cost competency based 6 month alternatives like WGU
@@JonFernquestNah, too self-referential. University shouldn’t be about university at all. It should be about the world and how to improve it, period. Universities are relevant when they don’t talk about themselves.
And how the labor market works, so everyone must be aware of what implies the risk of doing a career that probably wont have too many employments when you get your degree.
@@gs7828 an opinion, offer an argument, presumably skills provided by your university training 🤣critical university studies can improve universities and the community they are embedded in, real world example is highlighting the lack of faculty and student social science research engagement on real life local issues, for instance the billions of dollars over-budget Honolulu light rail system, such megaprojects are important subjects of research en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaprojects_and_Risk
I am currently a junior editor in a very prestigious journal. I get zero money for it while they are hounding me every second day to do this or that. Recently, I wanted to send them an email and say that I will find a different place to volunteer rather than volunteering my free time to a multi-million dollar company. I love the fact that I am leaving academia next week. I'm moving to an industry position where my salary will be 53% higher.
I just finished my PhD in Earth Sciences and the mining company behind it didn't even watch my presentation online. In fact, they basically abandoned the project half way through because I did not find Ni and Cu where they wanted me to find it. I got to find something academically new and very cool, which ended up to be the main focus of my thesis, but... it will be only one more paper somewhere. One of the questions after my defense was if the mining company was happy about my thesis... My status now is "unemployed" !!
@@robertovillacortaguerra8081, this is an important topic. A PhD is a mindset that should make it easier to land a paying position. Once secured, you can move strings to convince and negotiate with others towards mutually beneficial objectives.
Nobody says to the youngsters that are applying to college that a career implies the same risks as to open a business: that even if the market has high demand for a kind of professional, couldn't be enough employments for too much graduates or that your area of qualification could be in decline or doesn't exist anymore.
My dad was a really good researcher in the 80s. His entire research was "stolen". He worked with a professor and was 2 years raising rats and whatnot. When it was time to publish his findings the main professor just stapled his name and like 3 other people's before my dad's. The other people were all new tonthe laboratory so my dad was really pissed, they were like political favors. The others ended up traveling to a lot of conferences with his research and my dad was told to stay here. When they came back my dad went berserk and sent them all to hell.
Amazing video. 100% agree with you. Academia is getting darker, as the time passes there are more and more difficulties. I am about to finish PhD but I don't really see future in this field. I don't want to compete against people that are "warming the chair" 24 hours and succeeding by the contacts. It is really difficult to keep on these conditions.
Agree with all of these. A few thoughts: One thing to point out is that one of the reasons that industry collaborates with unis is.... they get free research. They might put in for part of a PhD scholarship (or a whole one if they're really generous) and in return they get cheap labour and access to all the uni infrastructure. And, for the pathetic amounts that industry contributes, the collaboration gets hyped beyond reason. And the unis always look desperate in these relationships. Also: there's always some bureaucrat who's been hired by the Uni as "Industrial Collaborations Liaison Officer" or somesuch, earns an undeserved six figure salary, and does nothing but get in the way. (The amount of money wasting cruft in Uni administration is appalling. You could sack 3/4 of admin and things would work just fine). Your point about networks etc is bang on too. Usually the Crusty Old Professor will choose an acolyte who they have decided will be their successor and gets bestowed with all their blessings and have their career fast tracked. Everyone else? Tough luck. Sometimes it's because the acolyte is in fact smart, but other time it's for... reasons.... This can happen at the institutional level too: one or two members of staff get blessed with special job titles and privileges while the rest just have to muck along. But really it all comes back to the fundamental question of What Universities Are For. And the answer is: to manage a property and investment portfolio. If you thought it had anything to do with learning and research, you're wrong. They're just the grist for the end goal.
All institutions of learning have been taken over by the administrator class. The administrator class firmly believe that the professors, instructors, and researchers are there for THEM, rather than the other way around. As long as the administrator class has the power to enforce this weird "understanding" that they are the true spirit and owners of the "system", and the scholars are "the help", nothing will change. Since the system already favored those "scholars" that work well within that system and understanding for many generations now, it is essentially impossible to reform it from within. The whole thing is one glorious dance of pretending to care about various and sundry "goals" that have nothing to do with the actual goals of an institution of learning, which get accomplished very partially as an unavoidable by-product of the theater.
This is a different take on only choosing people from specific universities. I was looking for a summer job in comp sci. I called up the internship office at Tamdem Computers (a big player at that time) and was told they didn’t take CVs from students at second tier colleges (California State Colleges). I sent my resume in anyway and got a job. I was the only intern that finished my project in the group and had my code included in shipped operating systems. The powers that be are idiots for excluding promising candidates.
I've been following your work for over a year now. I really think what you do is incredible. It's an oasis in the middle of the desert of ideas in the academic world. In Brazil, we call our articles salamito (small salami), we slice them up and produce new articles. Quantity over quality, so that we can do well in the scorecard for federal university entrance exams. And if you're not aligned with the epistemology of the selection board... forget it, your chances are close to zero.
Science communication can go off the rails in a much more interesting way too. I always hated these usual flashy, colourful, playful experiments and shows, not for the reason that they don't prepare you for the boring parts, but for the reason that they don't tell you anything about the motivation of a scientist and the true beauty of science, they don't reflect the excitement of understanding. On the other hand, I loved well-written books explaining the scientific concepts on kids' level, and I still love well-crafted youtube videos illustrating AND explaining the scientific phenomena, or reflecting on how amazing it was that someone was able to achieve this or that in that point in history. And what did I find? That the love of science history and science communication did not prepare me for DOING science. Only for appreciating good science communication. I am willing to read the same book or watch the same youtube video three times, just to praise and enjoy how well-written or well-edited they are. If I was interested in science, and not science communication, I would look for something new once I got the concept for the first time, and I would find the second read or view already boring...
I think the world in general doesn't teach you enough to focus on what you enjoy doing when it comes to careers, it's all about the topic. But topics of interest can imo change more readily than activities you enjoy and are suited for character-wise.
It's not just young academics who need a chance - I imagine you actually mean "new" or "early career" academics, as there are a lot of mature students these days who have moved into education in midlife.
Why are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, Sage Publications, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, University of Chicago Press, and MIT Press not owned and operated as open access publications? The research that they publish is overwhelmingly funded by governments. Therefore it stands to reason that the outputs of this research should be freely available to the public. National governments should set up open access equivalents of all existing journals. The journals would be funded by national governments and run by academics in a transparent and accountable way to achieve public purposes. Authors, peer reviewers, and editors would be paid for their work. Over time the established journals would struggle to attract submissions. The owners of those journals would be desperate to sell their now much less valuable assets. Then national governments could buy the established journals and integrate them into the new open access model. It wouldn't be difficult. National governments that issue their own highly sought-after currency and that can mobilise significant amounts of real resources are far more powerful than corporations.
Thanks for the video. Lots of interesting things here especially about the pitfalls of cooperation. However I would be careful with the generalisations about age. As others have pointed out 'early career' and 'young' are not necessarily the same thing. I might be a bit sensitive about age generalisations as my second supervisor was a (now deceased) retired historian who was unbelieveably good at encouraging me to think beyond the narrow details of my thesis. Perhaps it may vary by discipline but the historians I met who were PhD students in the 1960s, 1970s, and even 1980s often had the most original ideas and really encouraged collaboration. I am a much more detail focused person so I found this very beneficial. Yes I have interacted with older academics who gave terrible career advice and had no knowledge of the current job market, but I also know others who actively worked with students to get better job opportunities outside of academia because they did not like the way academia had changed. Thanks again
the fact that as a young researcher you're told that you just need to tough it out, take a low paying job, then maybe another, move around or live hours away from your spouse and family, have zero job security, etc because that shows that you truly "want this" and are truly "passionate" about science is crazy. I've had tenured professors tell me that if I'm not willing to take a job in a different country and live off of a third of what an industry job would pay me after my phd, all while commuting 5 hours and spending 1-2 nights away from my family every week (and this was considered "mild" since I wasn't forced to be near campus 24/7), then I *clearly* am not truly interested in science. The same professors that "supervised" me during my postdoc but one of them literally couldn't present the research on his own because he had no idea about the math. The same professors that earn 200+k and have their phds and postdocs do the work for them. And their reasons for saying all of this were always a variation on "I did it. I was *really* passionate about this and put the work in, so I got my big important position. Perseverance pays off and all who failed just weren't driven enough." I would sort of look past idiotic statements like these if they were not literally people whose central "thing" in life is understanding the scientific method and statistical analyses and understanding what things like survivorship bias or confirmation bias are. They clearly have a highly selective way of choosing when to use logic.
Yeah those who go off saying they put the effort in kind of have survivors bias. You have to suffer in order to have a modicum of success and making the process easier is wrong, because this is how I went through things, you must suffer too. It's a big problem not just in academia but also wierdly a very common British citizen attitude of the older generations, who want the generation that come after them not only to suffer but to suffer more than them. It's a wierd instinct that I personally do not understand.
I'm going into this thinking that I'll agree with a lot of these. Let's see how it goes. New ideas: this is accurate, UNLESS that professor is also in the startup space, in which case they'll probably indulge you, assuming they have the funds for pet projects. My favorite professors are the ones who have a little corner in their lab where they're doing their own little project. And when a student expresses interest, they'll go, "Oh? You want that?" And they'll hand it off, starting a new thing they can have fun with. Old professors like this do exist, but they are very obvious to spot. You'll know them when you meet them. Kid's science: I have a soft spot for scientific showmanship. I moonlight as a fire dancer. I use my art to teach mechanics, trigonometry, and even emission chemistry, because I definitely will change the color of the fire from time to time - they especially love greens and blues. I'll happily show kids other science things I love. As a gem collector, you can find all kinds of cool stones with interesting properties, my favorites being opal and alexandrite. And of course, you can never go wrong with nanomaterials, which are probably my favorite thing in the world. But I do get what you mean. There needs to be a more sober presentation of science as well. Scam journals: I've only published twice, both in the same journal, and I do tend to agree. It's horrible how journals make huge money off of scientific labor, when the academics get one for themselves for the work they put out. And citizens, who fund work via their taxes, do not have access. Alexandra Elbakyan is absolutely right about this. Old Professors: Considering how large universities are getting, this one is a no brainer. The problem is administrators don't necessarily see things in the same way. When I see new institutes opening, I always get excited to see all of the new faculty who might be coming aboard. Eventually, I hope to be one of them :) ... is my bias showing yet? Academia-Industry collaborations: I think they need to be at the same level in my opinion. Big labs should collaborate with large companies, and smaller labs should collaborate with startups. The reason is due to tool availability, manpower, maneuverability, and ability to see eye to eye. Privilege: the branding issue is also something I agree with. People can go to a big school and not do much. People can also go to a no-name state school and come out with outstanding work. But the latter won't find a position due to branding. I think the only way to change this is to move into a system that does not rely on marketing, but on tangible analysis of the work done. But that's a cumbersome process, so that's not what is going to happen. At least, not any time soon.
in astronomy, most journals are moving towards open access (although this means that one pays to publish); the Open Journal of Astrophysics is the only journal that I know of which is open access and has a fair publication cost
"Academia is all about writing and persuading" cannot be stressed enough. You would think that research is about finding answers to interesting questions, but it's really not. Maybe 20% of the time you spent on research will be the true exploration. The remaining 80% of the time is persuading others that your question is interesting, your methodology is innovative, your answer is robust, you abide to the academic convention, etc. It is soul-crushing. A bit out of topic. I always find the story of Yitang Zhang inspiring. If you want to do monumental theory research, as monumental as the progressing in the twin prime conjecture, then ironically being a teaching professor could be a good way to go. You are guaranteed a paycheck by something that would be very academically easy for you. Granted it's hard to be a good teacher, but not that most universities really care anyway. Doing laboratory research is a whole different story.
@@nimrod06 It is possible to work in bad academics with a good genius, but with evil genius, even the best academic environment will not lead to intellectual exploration.
CV cannot be made double-blind, but peer-review of articles can. That would eliminate the blatant bias in favor of famous names and institutions, allowing more obscure scientists (regardless of age) to have a fairer chance to be published in “prestigious” journals and build up their careers. At some point soon, it would be possible to feed the text of the paper through AI to prevent people from leaving their calling cards. And citations should be revealed only after the paper has been accepted. Otherwise, both calling cards as well as mutual scratching of backs would still corrupt the process. Academia has been a feudal wasteland and needs to reform dramatically. My two cents.
The complaint about academic publishing is probably a lukewarm take at this point. At worst old professors might be apathetic towards the publishing system but everyone else knows how bad it is and is open about it.
I agree w journals needing impovments and the average scientist needs more time to do usefull research. Also people should (independly) work on the same issues, without publishing fear. Not to replace peer-review but to add another layer- if you are finished and send your resulut to the problem to a journal you also have to look at all your peers research and explain there resuluts. But universities definitivly should continue to work hirchicaly and you work your way bottom up.
How about creating Wikijournals, where the papers are free to view? If all the peer review etc has already been done, then the admin cost to doing that should be about the same as Wikipedia, only requiring the occasional public request for contributions to fund it.
The reward for a science career is prestige, not money. It's a good choice if you need to impress someone (family, spouse, network or future employer). IMO, for normal, smart, hard working people there just isn't enough return on time invested to justify going into science.
If you have a new idea - go get VC money and develop it yourself. Otherwise academics will either 1) bury it because it's not their idea or 2) ignore it because it doesn't help their idea.
If we are to ask 3 professors representing the fields (materials science, chemistry and physics) with H-index over 100, citations over 200,000 and number of paper publications over 500, the simple question, "From where does the industry comes from?". Try and answer it verbally and completely under 10 seconds and on the spot. If all 3 of them are unable to do so, this means that when they were younger as PhD students, their supervisors too are unable to answer that question verbally and completely under 10 seconds and on the spot. Only by knowing the complete answer to this simple question, only then, over 6 billions human beings on this planet will know that paper publications are not even mentioned in the complete answer.
Things are. You could be a handicapped person agreeing to mental health. You could need a voucher to afford a rural apartment. Do you want to be a doctor? Doctors are fined when they box someone rather than provide sufficient medication, very much a catch-22. You go on down to a grocer, and you'd better count, since I have better milk and higher quality ice cream for those who get what they want. So what would you like to get? Please do watch closely for scams everywhere, I'm tempted to ask a car dealer for a car, and I'd better not buy that.
I really enjoy your helpful videos on AI and suggestions for success in the PhD and have shared them widely over the past couple of years. Your critique of academia has merit but also has the vibe of ax-grinding and also is very 2010s and reflects your increasingly dated perspective in this arena. Academia has changed a lot: baby boomers are almost all gone now versus 10 yrs ago, Australian libraries have organised open access with most journals for most papers, and the commonwealth research evaluation process (ERA) that drove the poor decisions of hiring high flyer professor types is gone (international rankings are still around though, unfortunately). I think your critique of science communication for kids and that research is persuasion are a bit flat. Every profession is way more boring than portrayed to kids. Being a firefighter, doctor, astronaut are all pretty shit compared to the flashy imagery kids see. Science is no different. Same goes re: persuasion. I would turn the tables and say that a brilliant idea that isn't communicated well is far more tragic and will be lost. Happily I see most new academics as being better communicators than the ones who are retiring.
If you want to develop a new idea, then don't pair with established academicians. Do so on your own if you can afford the expense, make sure your employment contract, agreement, etc. does not inhibit your working on outside projects with or without turning over the benefits to your employer. If that's satisfied, then go ahead. Despite the advertising and propaganda to the contrary, the academy, in my experience, only permits researchers in the top of the hierarchy to pursue new interests. Others may incrementally tweak existing models but not develop beyond that.
Academia is an industry, not a community. The students are the fodder that fills the belly of the broken machine that no one is really trying to fix. Welcome to adulthood.
#7: The universities wrecked millions of lives by making people waste their youth on jobless degrees. Literally millions of middle class people trusted their children and life savings on the universities, and now they are poor and in debt. #8: It took science less than 300 years to critically endanger the health of the planet and engineer the biggest episode of mass extinction in the last 60 million years. #9: Science introduced the idea of materialism, making the global dominant ideologies consider humans as replaceable as machines and thoughts as malleable as a drool response. #10: AI. Those fucking morons spent over 70 years trying to develop AI while everybody with a pulse knew that it would be the mother of bad ideas.
Numerous paper publications, H-index and citations are just academia number games, these professors are playing for their own self-ambition to gain tenureship, professorship and promotion, they (High number of publications, High H-index, High citations) do not necessary change the world. The world has not changes or benefits from their lifelong research work. No new jobs or industry comes from their lifelong research work. They are yet to make a discovery that can change the world. Examples: automotive, synthetic plastic, penicillin, atomic bomb, transistor, laser, etc.. These professors are just walking down the path of a "cruel, mean pendant scholar" basing on the doctrine "Publish or perish".
Screw Academia. Seriously. It's an elitist bureaucratic framework which kills creativity and innovation. Universities are ran like businesses, where the quantity of pepers is more important than the content of these papers. Graduates are so creatively constipated that they can't come up with research topics. There's a lot of research to be done in the field of theoretical physics. But none of that research will ever get funded. Because the funds come from private companies which follow the money. Furthermore, universities are dogmatic to a fault and won't challenge old ideas written in the textbook. Theoretical physics hasn't evolved much beyond string theory. That's like 1950s scripture. Nobody can explain what dark matter is, that's like most of the matter in the universe. Some "crazy" guy could come up with innovative papers and will immediately be shut down by the academics. Einstein would be considered a cook in 2024. He was lucky to be published decades prior.
Super misleading to say "All of the taxpayer money that goes into the research gets locked behind paywalls". The taxpayers money goes to pay the salary of the scientists + all the tech that the uni needs for a certain projects. The results of the research are locked behind paywalls - sure, but not the taxpayers money. Because in the end, we do research mostly for the goverments, and they are the ones, who get the reports and do or do not apply the new knowledge. That goes for govnmt funded projects, which I would suspect is the majority of academia, at least in EU
I find it funny when people complain about journals. This is what you get when you live in a capitalist society: some big company will exploit your work! There is nothing you can do about it because you like capitalism!
Blackrock, vanguard, who also are invested in massmedia, microsoft, apple, nvidia, even little shitty newspapers as the swedish aftonbladet. Their fingers are in every fucking jar. Let it collapse already.
![Things you don't say out loud in academia [9 open secrets]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/sgAlFPMugWw/mqdefault.jpg)
publically funded research should be published in a national journal/archive and made available to the citizen, it was funded with tax money and should be made available to the tax payer
The archive is one of the few things that is probably best made state run since it's impossible to make money on it
Agreed.
@@samsonsoturian6013 hmmmm the state is inherently political and prone to corruption no.
@@igora2714the market is inherently greedy and corrupt.
@@igora2714You think business isn't corrupt? 😂😂😂
All universities should offer a first-year elective course called "The University" that explains the university in its social, historical, political, and economic context - so students have at least some formal understanding of what they're actually getting themselves into.
That is called critical university studies which perhaps because of low self critical capacity is hardly present in universities and university research, left leaning politically biased unbalanced approach would be another problem if actually implemented, but there is a slow meltdown with rising tuition student debt online alternatives, low cost competency based 6 month alternatives like WGU
Imagine something similar for any industry sector... It would be a circus.
@@JonFernquestNah, too self-referential. University shouldn’t be about university at all. It should be about the world and how to improve it, period. Universities are relevant when they don’t talk about themselves.
And how the labor market works, so everyone must be aware of what implies the risk of doing a career that probably wont have too many employments when you get your degree.
@@gs7828 an opinion, offer an argument, presumably skills provided by your university training 🤣critical university studies can improve universities and the community they are embedded in, real world example is highlighting the lack of faculty and student social science research engagement on real life local issues, for instance the billions of dollars over-budget Honolulu light rail system, such megaprojects are important subjects of research en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaprojects_and_Risk
I am currently a junior editor in a very prestigious journal. I get zero money for it while they are hounding me every second day to do this or that. Recently, I wanted to send them an email and say that I will find a different place to volunteer rather than volunteering my free time to a multi-million dollar company. I love the fact that I am leaving academia next week. I'm moving to an industry position where my salary will be 53% higher.
Story of my life
I just finished my PhD in Earth Sciences and the mining company behind it didn't even watch my presentation online. In fact, they basically abandoned the project half way through because I did not find Ni and Cu where they wanted me to find it. I got to find something academically new and very cool, which ended up to be the main focus of my thesis, but... it will be only one more paper somewhere. One of the questions after my defense was if the mining company was happy about my thesis... My status now is "unemployed" !!
😩 I am hearing more and more stories like this
Should've played the game to get paid.
@@robertovillacortaguerra8081, this is an important topic. A PhD is a mindset that should make it easier to land a paying position. Once secured, you can move strings to convince and negotiate with others towards mutually beneficial objectives.
Nobody says to the youngsters that are applying to college that a career implies the same risks as to open a business: that even if the market has high demand for a kind of professional, couldn't be enough employments for too much graduates or that your area of qualification could be in decline or doesn't exist anymore.
Let me guess, Brazil? Nexa?
My dad was a really good researcher in the 80s. His entire research was "stolen". He worked with a professor and was 2 years raising rats and whatnot. When it was time to publish his findings the main professor just stapled his name and like 3 other people's before my dad's. The other people were all new tonthe laboratory so my dad was really pissed, they were like political favors. The others ended up traveling to a lot of conferences with his research and my dad was told to stay here. When they came back my dad went berserk and sent them all to hell.
Amazing video. 100% agree with you. Academia is getting darker, as the time passes there are more and more difficulties. I am about to finish PhD but I don't really see future in this field. I don't want to compete against people that are "warming the chair" 24 hours and succeeding by the contacts. It is really difficult to keep on these conditions.
Agree with all of these. A few thoughts:
One thing to point out is that one of the reasons that industry collaborates with unis is.... they get free research. They might put in for part of a PhD scholarship (or a whole one if they're really generous) and in return they get cheap labour and access to all the uni infrastructure. And, for the pathetic amounts that industry contributes, the collaboration gets hyped beyond reason. And the unis always look desperate in these relationships. Also: there's always some bureaucrat who's been hired by the Uni as "Industrial Collaborations Liaison Officer" or somesuch, earns an undeserved six figure salary, and does nothing but get in the way. (The amount of money wasting cruft in Uni administration is appalling. You could sack 3/4 of admin and things would work just fine).
Your point about networks etc is bang on too. Usually the Crusty Old Professor will choose an acolyte who they have decided will be their successor and gets bestowed with all their blessings and have their career fast tracked. Everyone else? Tough luck. Sometimes it's because the acolyte is in fact smart, but other time it's for... reasons....
This can happen at the institutional level too: one or two members of staff get blessed with special job titles and privileges while the rest just have to muck along.
But really it all comes back to the fundamental question of What Universities Are For. And the answer is: to manage a property and investment portfolio. If you thought it had anything to do with learning and research, you're wrong. They're just the grist for the end goal.
All institutions of learning have been taken over by the administrator class. The administrator class firmly believe that the professors, instructors, and researchers are there for THEM, rather than the other way around. As long as the administrator class has the power to enforce this weird "understanding" that they are the true spirit and owners of the "system", and the scholars are "the help", nothing will change. Since the system already favored those "scholars" that work well within that system and understanding for many generations now, it is essentially impossible to reform it from within. The whole thing is one glorious dance of pretending to care about various and sundry "goals" that have nothing to do with the actual goals of an institution of learning, which get accomplished very partially as an unavoidable by-product of the theater.
This is a different take on only choosing people from specific universities. I was looking for a summer job in comp sci. I called up the internship office at Tamdem Computers (a big player at that time) and was told they didn’t take CVs from students at second tier colleges (California State Colleges). I sent my resume in anyway and got a job. I was the only intern that finished my project in the group and had my code included in shipped operating systems. The powers that be are idiots for excluding promising candidates.
I've been following your work for over a year now. I really think what you do is incredible. It's an oasis in the middle of the desert of ideas in the academic world. In Brazil, we call our articles salamito (small salami), we slice them up and produce new articles. Quantity over quality, so that we can do well in the scorecard for federal university entrance exams. And if you're not aligned with the epistemology of the selection board... forget it, your chances are close to zero.
O que é epistemologia?
@@kumardigvijaymishra5945 The study of knowledge
This video resonates with my own awful and long-drawn experience in academic research. All true. Thanks for speaking out.
Please talk about how science being portrayed incortectly is hurting other, non-STEM areas of academia
Science communication can go off the rails in a much more interesting way too. I always hated these usual flashy, colourful, playful experiments and shows, not for the reason that they don't prepare you for the boring parts, but for the reason that they don't tell you anything about the motivation of a scientist and the true beauty of science, they don't reflect the excitement of understanding.
On the other hand, I loved well-written books explaining the scientific concepts on kids' level, and I still love well-crafted youtube videos illustrating AND explaining the scientific phenomena, or reflecting on how amazing it was that someone was able to achieve this or that in that point in history.
And what did I find? That the love of science history and science communication did not prepare me for DOING science. Only for appreciating good science communication. I am willing to read the same book or watch the same youtube video three times, just to praise and enjoy how well-written or well-edited they are. If I was interested in science, and not science communication, I would look for something new once I got the concept for the first time, and I would find the second read or view already boring...
I think the world in general doesn't teach you enough to focus on what you enjoy doing when it comes to careers, it's all about the topic. But topics of interest can imo change more readily than activities you enjoy and are suited for character-wise.
It's not just young academics who need a chance - I imagine you actually mean "new" or "early career" academics, as there are a lot of mature students these days who have moved into education in midlife.
Why are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, Sage Publications, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, University of Chicago Press, and MIT Press not owned and operated as open access publications? The research that they publish is overwhelmingly funded by governments. Therefore it stands to reason that the outputs of this research should be freely available to the public.
National governments should set up open access equivalents of all existing journals. The journals would be funded by national governments and run by academics in a transparent and accountable way to achieve public purposes. Authors, peer reviewers, and editors would be paid for their work. Over time the established journals would struggle to attract submissions. The owners of those journals would be desperate to sell their now much less valuable assets. Then national governments could buy the established journals and integrate them into the new open access model. It wouldn't be difficult. National governments that issue their own highly sought-after currency and that can mobilise significant amounts of real resources are far more powerful than corporations.
Thanks for the video. Lots of interesting things here especially about the pitfalls of cooperation. However I would be careful with the generalisations about age. As others have pointed out 'early career' and 'young' are not necessarily the same thing. I might be a bit sensitive about age generalisations as my second supervisor was a (now deceased) retired historian who was unbelieveably good at encouraging me to think beyond the narrow details of my thesis. Perhaps it may vary by discipline but the historians I met who were PhD students in the 1960s, 1970s, and even 1980s often had the most original ideas and really encouraged collaboration. I am a much more detail focused person so I found this very beneficial. Yes I have interacted with older academics who gave terrible career advice and had no knowledge of the current job market, but I also know others who actively worked with students to get better job opportunities outside of academia because they did not like the way academia had changed. Thanks again
the fact that as a young researcher you're told that you just need to tough it out, take a low paying job, then maybe another, move around or live hours away from your spouse and family, have zero job security, etc because that shows that you truly "want this" and are truly "passionate" about science is crazy.
I've had tenured professors tell me that if I'm not willing to take a job in a different country and live off of a third of what an industry job would pay me after my phd, all while commuting 5 hours and spending 1-2 nights away from my family every week (and this was considered "mild" since I wasn't forced to be near campus 24/7), then I *clearly* am not truly interested in science. The same professors that "supervised" me during my postdoc but one of them literally couldn't present the research on his own because he had no idea about the math. The same professors that earn 200+k and have their phds and postdocs do the work for them.
And their reasons for saying all of this were always a variation on "I did it. I was *really* passionate about this and put the work in, so I got my big important position. Perseverance pays off and all who failed just weren't driven enough." I would sort of look past idiotic statements like these if they were not literally people whose central "thing" in life is understanding the scientific method and statistical analyses and understanding what things like survivorship bias or confirmation bias are. They clearly have a highly selective way of choosing when to use logic.
Yeah those who go off saying they put the effort in kind of have survivors bias. You have to suffer in order to have a modicum of success and making the process easier is wrong, because this is how I went through things, you must suffer too. It's a big problem not just in academia but also wierdly a very common British citizen attitude of the older generations, who want the generation that come after them not only to suffer but to suffer more than them. It's a wierd instinct that I personally do not understand.
I enjoy watching your frank takes on Academia.
Andy is so funny and real. I feel so validated for gtfo of academia
I'm going into this thinking that I'll agree with a lot of these. Let's see how it goes.
New ideas: this is accurate, UNLESS that professor is also in the startup space, in which case they'll probably indulge you, assuming they have the funds for pet projects. My favorite professors are the ones who have a little corner in their lab where they're doing their own little project. And when a student expresses interest, they'll go, "Oh? You want that?" And they'll hand it off, starting a new thing they can have fun with. Old professors like this do exist, but they are very obvious to spot. You'll know them when you meet them.
Kid's science: I have a soft spot for scientific showmanship. I moonlight as a fire dancer. I use my art to teach mechanics, trigonometry, and even emission chemistry, because I definitely will change the color of the fire from time to time - they especially love greens and blues. I'll happily show kids other science things I love. As a gem collector, you can find all kinds of cool stones with interesting properties, my favorites being opal and alexandrite. And of course, you can never go wrong with nanomaterials, which are probably my favorite thing in the world. But I do get what you mean. There needs to be a more sober presentation of science as well.
Scam journals: I've only published twice, both in the same journal, and I do tend to agree. It's horrible how journals make huge money off of scientific labor, when the academics get one for themselves for the work they put out. And citizens, who fund work via their taxes, do not have access. Alexandra Elbakyan is absolutely right about this.
Old Professors: Considering how large universities are getting, this one is a no brainer. The problem is administrators don't necessarily see things in the same way. When I see new institutes opening, I always get excited to see all of the new faculty who might be coming aboard. Eventually, I hope to be one of them :) ... is my bias showing yet?
Academia-Industry collaborations: I think they need to be at the same level in my opinion. Big labs should collaborate with large companies, and smaller labs should collaborate with startups. The reason is due to tool availability, manpower, maneuverability, and ability to see eye to eye.
Privilege: the branding issue is also something I agree with. People can go to a big school and not do much. People can also go to a no-name state school and come out with outstanding work. But the latter won't find a position due to branding. I think the only way to change this is to move into a system that does not rely on marketing, but on tangible analysis of the work done. But that's a cumbersome process, so that's not what is going to happen. At least, not any time soon.
Ai writing 😅
This channel kicks
good video Andy!
in astronomy, most journals are moving towards open access (although this means that one pays to publish); the Open Journal of Astrophysics is the only journal that I know of which is open access and has a fair publication cost
We have a nice 2700 CHF fee for some materials journals. This is about 18000 "money" in Brazil.
"Academia is all about writing and persuading" cannot be stressed enough. You would think that research is about finding answers to interesting questions, but it's really not. Maybe 20% of the time you spent on research will be the true exploration. The remaining 80% of the time is persuading others that your question is interesting, your methodology is innovative, your answer is robust, you abide to the academic convention, etc. It is soul-crushing.
A bit out of topic.
I always find the story of Yitang Zhang inspiring. If you want to do monumental theory research, as monumental as the progressing in the twin prime conjecture, then ironically being a teaching professor could be a good way to go. You are guaranteed a paycheck by something that would be very academically easy for you. Granted it's hard to be a good teacher, but not that most universities really care anyway. Doing laboratory research is a whole different story.
Genius is 99% perspiration and only about 1% inspiration.
@@kumardigvijaymishra5945 Hardwork on intellectual exploration, not persuading people who knows little about the subject to give you money.
@@nimrod06 One has to do lot of hard-work in persuading almost everyone in academics.
@@kumardigvijaymishra5945 yes but that is not related to genius or not
@@nimrod06 It is possible to work in bad academics with a good genius, but with evil genius, even the best academic environment will not lead to intellectual exploration.
CV cannot be made double-blind, but peer-review of articles can. That would eliminate the blatant bias in favor of famous names and institutions, allowing more obscure scientists (regardless of age) to have a fairer chance to be published in “prestigious” journals and build up their careers. At some point soon, it would be possible to feed the text of the paper through AI to prevent people from leaving their calling cards. And citations should be revealed only after the paper has been accepted. Otherwise, both calling cards as well as mutual scratching of backs would still corrupt the process. Academia has been a feudal wasteland and needs to reform dramatically. My two cents.
Well-said brave man.
Excellent teake!
I would toobm in an integrated under/graduated program...they don't, help wont even take a half hour to chat and probably expect to get paid for it.
The complaint about academic publishing is probably a lukewarm take at this point. At worst old professors might be apathetic towards the publishing system but everyone else knows how bad it is and is open about it.
Great video, thanks!
"Just fighting in their corner for using their techniques and skills." Right on the money.
In math at least every paper goes on the Arxiv so paywalls are basically no longer an issue ever.
I agree w journals needing impovments and the average scientist needs more time to do usefull research. Also people should (independly) work on the same issues, without publishing fear. Not to replace peer-review but to add another layer- if you are finished and send your resulut to the problem to a journal you also have to look at all your peers research and explain there resuluts.
But universities definitivly should continue to work hirchicaly and you work your way bottom up.
How about creating Wikijournals, where the papers are free to view? If all the peer review etc has already been done, then the admin cost to doing that should be about the same as Wikipedia, only requiring the occasional public request for contributions to fund it.
well, you ended up making a pretty good science show, after all, ...
Crusty old professors 😭
The reward for a science career is prestige, not money. It's a good choice if you need to impress someone (family, spouse, network or future employer). IMO, for normal, smart, hard working people there just isn't enough return on time invested to justify going into science.
If you have a new idea - go get VC money and develop it yourself. Otherwise academics will either 1) bury it because it's not their idea or 2) ignore it because it doesn't help their idea.
Scientist now but I really did not like science shows when I was a kid. I loved art and sport.
Papers are disseminated via piracy and torrents like movies lol
So the reason is, it's full of dusty old, self absorbed, money grubbing, gravelicious clout chasers. I get it.
If we are to ask 3 professors representing the fields (materials science, chemistry and physics) with H-index over
100, citations over 200,000 and number of paper publications over 500, the simple question, "From where does the industry comes from?".
Try and answer it verbally and completely under 10 seconds and on the spot. If all 3 of them are unable to do so, this means that when they were younger as PhD
students, their supervisors too are unable to answer that question verbally and completely under 10 seconds and on the spot.
Only by knowing the complete answer to this simple question, only then, over 6 billions human beings on this planet will know
that paper publications are not even mentioned in the complete answer.
Spot on
Things are. You could be a handicapped person agreeing to mental health. You could need a voucher to afford a rural apartment. Do you want to be a doctor? Doctors are fined when they box someone rather than provide sufficient medication, very much a catch-22. You go on down to a grocer, and you'd better count, since I have better milk and higher quality ice cream for those who get what they want. So what would you like to get? Please do watch closely for scams everywhere, I'm tempted to ask a car dealer for a car, and I'd better not buy that.
What are you doing now Andy? Are you in industry now?
true to the bones!
I really enjoy your helpful videos on AI and suggestions for success in the PhD and have shared them widely over the past couple of years. Your critique of academia has merit but also has the vibe of ax-grinding and also is very 2010s and reflects your increasingly dated perspective in this arena. Academia has changed a lot: baby boomers are almost all gone now versus 10 yrs ago, Australian libraries have organised open access with most journals for most papers, and the commonwealth research evaluation process (ERA) that drove the poor decisions of hiring high flyer professor types is gone (international rankings are still around though, unfortunately).
I think your critique of science communication for kids and that research is persuasion are a bit flat. Every profession is way more boring than portrayed to kids. Being a firefighter, doctor, astronaut are all pretty shit compared to the flashy imagery kids see. Science is no different. Same goes re: persuasion. I would turn the tables and say that a brilliant idea that isn't communicated well is far more tragic and will be lost. Happily I see most new academics as being better communicators than the ones who are retiring.
If you want to develop a new idea, then don't pair with established academicians. Do so on your own if you can afford the expense, make sure your employment contract, agreement, etc. does not inhibit your working on outside projects with or without turning over the benefits to your employer. If that's satisfied, then go ahead.
Despite the advertising and propaganda to the contrary, the academy, in my experience, only permits researchers in the top of the hierarchy to pursue new interests. Others may incrementally tweak existing models but not develop beyond that.
I understood 😁
❤
yes....just yes...on all fronts.
I like your top👕
Academia is an industry, not a community. The students are the fodder that fills the belly of the broken machine that no one is really trying to fix. Welcome to adulthood.
Science circus. Yes.
A real scientist wants to do the work that scientists do, not “be” a scientist. There’s a difference. A big difference.
I like your t-shirt
#7: The universities wrecked millions of lives by making people waste their youth on jobless degrees. Literally millions of middle class people trusted their children and life savings on the universities, and now they are poor and in debt.
#8: It took science less than 300 years to critically endanger the health of the planet and engineer the biggest episode of mass extinction in the last 60 million years.
#9: Science introduced the idea of materialism, making the global dominant ideologies consider humans as replaceable as machines and thoughts as malleable as a drool response.
#10: AI. Those fucking morons spent over 70 years trying to develop AI while everybody with a pulse knew that it would be the mother of bad ideas.
Do we taxpayers get anything out of it?
Numerous paper publications, H-index and citations are just academia number games, these professors are playing for their own self-ambition
to gain tenureship, professorship and promotion, they (High number of publications, High H-index, High citations) do not necessary change the world.
The world has not changes or benefits from their lifelong research work. No new jobs or industry comes from their lifelong research work. They are yet to make
a discovery that can change the world. Examples: automotive, synthetic plastic, penicillin, atomic bomb, transistor, laser, etc..
These professors are just walking down the path of a "cruel, mean pendant scholar" basing on the doctrine "Publish or perish".
Screw Academia. Seriously. It's an elitist bureaucratic framework which kills creativity and innovation. Universities are ran like businesses, where the quantity of pepers is more important than the content of these papers. Graduates are so creatively constipated that they can't come up with research topics. There's a lot of research to be done in the field of theoretical physics. But none of that research will ever get funded. Because the funds come from private companies which follow the money. Furthermore, universities are dogmatic to a fault and won't challenge old ideas written in the textbook. Theoretical physics hasn't evolved much beyond string theory. That's like 1950s scripture. Nobody can explain what dark matter is, that's like most of the matter in the universe. Some "crazy" guy could come up with innovative papers and will immediately be shut down by the academics. Einstein would be considered a cook in 2024. He was lucky to be published decades prior.
Andy, you seem to be ....by some old professor...
Super misleading to say "All of the taxpayer money that goes into the research gets locked behind paywalls". The taxpayers money goes to pay the salary of the scientists + all the tech that the uni needs for a certain projects. The results of the research are locked behind paywalls - sure, but not the taxpayers money. Because in the end, we do research mostly for the goverments, and they are the ones, who get the reports and do or do not apply the new knowledge. That goes for govnmt funded projects, which I would suspect is the majority of academia, at least in EU
It end's up being businesses that end up converting the knowledge that is tax payer funded into something useful.
Sci-Hub is the most important science-advancing invention aside Open Science. Research knowledge belongs to everyone!
I find it funny when people complain about journals. This is what you get when you live in a capitalist society: some big company will exploit your work! There is nothing you can do about it because you like capitalism!
Shutt UP, marxist mórron.🤫🤫🤫
Not every institution is the same but there are certainly a lot of problems at the global level.
Science deniers don't care, they just want someone internal to tell them "academia is broken" to make them feel less insecure about their intelligence
😚😘
Every video of this channel is about how he hates academia. I 100% agree with you, but move on bud.
Hey Andy, do you think it's time you moved on? Academia wasn't for you. OK, cool.
Fr?
That's not how content creating works.
@@zah936 It's not how bad content creating works, no. So do something better.
4:10 where do all the money go?
Blackrock, vanguard, who also are invested in massmedia, microsoft, apple, nvidia, even little shitty newspapers as the swedish aftonbladet. Their fingers are in every fucking jar. Let it collapse already.
Publishers
Sci-Hub internationally legalized