Very early on, I noticed that graduate students tend to be idealistic, postdocs extremely cynical, and faculty ruthlessly pragmatic perhaps to the point of occasional shortsightedness. Clearly, something about this progression is expected and normal. I'm a postdoc now, so I'm right on schedule.

I think the way it ultimately works is that you have to be disillusioned from the grade-school fairy tales told to the public about how science works before you can learn to live and work in the environment that actually exists rather than the one you wish existed.

> "Never question a scientific superior?" Not parsing that concept, please elaborate.

tech < grad student < postdoc < junior faculty < full prof < Big Guy/Gal < Nobel Laureate < NIH Director

People above you in that chain will accept limited feedback on methods to attain their chosen goals and will greatly resent questions about whether their selected goals are worthwhile/realistic/rational, or whether their gestalt vision of the field's conventional wisdom is correct.

"People above you in that chain will accept limited feedback on methods to attain their chosen goals and will greatly resent questions about whether their selected goals are worthwhile/realistic/rational, or whether their gestalt vision of the field's conventional wisdom is correct."

Corporate management has the exact same situation.

Yeah but it's a lot easier to not care.

Yeah, in corporate world, at least you're paid to not care, and can change jobs easily. In academia, you're paid shit, and changing labs is not nearly as easy.

I agree with most of the GP's points and I don't think of them as defeatist, but rather a call for realism when dealing with people (versus data, which have no ego to bruise). It's very hard to devise a system that rewards individual achievement without ever falling prey to classic human flaws. The good news is that science over time tends to be self-correcting, and all that requires is a commitment to shared principles and methods, combined with enough anarchy that no one individual can screw up an entire field (Trofim Lysenko being the most extreme example, but any bureaucracy can accomplish this).

The presentation is cynical, as xab31 themself attests, but I don't think it's defeatist.

1. Bad work only being displaced by good work: everything works like this. To replace some useless commercial product (take your pick) someone has to come up with something better. Same goes for information.

2. Nobody liking criticism can be rephrased as it being important to attack ideas, not people, when you have to work with those people.

3. "Never question a scientific superior" is the first piece of advise I think is too cynical. As a warning against undermining a colleague in public when you need their support, I agree, and that's kind of a restatement of #1 and #2. But science really does have a culture of publicly debating contentious ideas. You can definitely be more critical in an event specifically held as a debate / open forum than in a presentation Q&A though, and at a social event it's polite to be at least vaguely supportive.

Kind of a tangent to the later points: Day to day scientific research is mostly chasing dead ends and other activity that is (in hindsight) mostly useless, but there is genuine societal value in having a large body of skilled workers available. That is, science spends a lot of time spinning its wheels trying to figure out the right question to ask, and once this becomes clear there is rapid progress. This means the papers published in between the breakthrough periods aren't really worth paying attention to unless you work in that area. Having a lot of scientists and engineers in the workforce so we collectively have a decent chance at obtaining and exploiting next breakthrough is the point, the papers are just a byproduct.

>"Never question a scientific superior?" Not parsing that concept, please elaborate.

If you think you've been put on a bum topic or your supervisor has put you on the scientific equivalent of a PIP with no way up or out your room for maneuvering is limited, to put it politely.

I understand the impulse to not want to be defeatist, but sometimes it’s both easier and more productive to stop running into the same walls over and over and instead find the path around them.

It is what it is, and it is mostly pretty successful. More or less.

Well, as defeatist as going to work fo a FAANG and not expecting that your managers will give a toss about fairness, their users privacy, or the spirit of regulations. Life is like this. Right now in the African Savannah a lion is mauling a gazelle, it happens daily.