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Re:How I Erased Facebook Comments and Likes by jsemrau on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @05:12PM (#16692759)
Why are these people not creating spaceships, exploring the deep of the oceans, or curing cancer?
Re:How I Erased Facebook Comments and Likes by periya on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @06:11PM (#16693242)
There is no advertising money in those fields.
Re:How I Erased Facebook Comments and Likes by mattkrause on Wednesday March 28, 2018 @09:32AM (#16697478)
Lest you think this is an exaggeration, graduate students and postdocs make peanuts, who would be doing the cancer research, make peanuts.

Starting salary for a postdoc is a bit less than $50k, and this is after 5+ years of grad school, during which you make even less (often $20-30k) One can expect to be a postdoc for 3-5+ years before becoming remotely competitive for an independent (faculty) position, and another 5 years before the job is relatively secure. The competition for these jobs—and the remaining industrial ones—is savage and unpredictable.

This is bad for so many reasons: frantic people don’t do careful experiments or do good science, very smart people opt out all together and figure out how to make you click on ads instead, and a lot of time, money, and effort gets wasted in the churn.

If you want more cancer research and less ad optimization, nag your reps to improve how we fund research!