Society is better of with good people in academia, but an individual is better off out.
It is - for tenured professors at good schools. But getting to that point is intensely competitive, and the vast majority of people don't make it.
That is so strange. In the corporate world it is always easy and straightforward to say no to higher ups. They always accept a no gracefully. /S
In my experience, the best organization are the ones that are willing to get bottom up feedback. The more feedback is accepted and acted upon, the best is the organization. None gets it 100%, most are just half good at it.
> do the right and scientific thing and ruin my future in academia, or do what my peers are doing and make senior faculty like me.
Look for a middle ground. Do not make things worse if you cannot make them better. You will get small wins and wins will become bigger with time. And remember how it felt so you do not repeat the same behavior when you are at the top.
Sometimes, there are reason why things are like they are. Try to change the system instead of change people.
I know, the grass is always greener on the other side.
> Look for a middle ground. Do not make things worse if you cannot make them better. You will get small wins and wins will become bigger with time. And remember how it felt so you do not repeat the same behavior when you are at the top.
This is what I'm currently trying to do. Unsurprisingly, it takes more effort (time and energy) to solve this problem given constraints (the constraints being: make advisor happy + find a middle ground). It'd be much easier if the constraints were not there, or if I could just drop the second constraint.
When I hear your request, I am hearing you ask me to fudge the numbers so that this experiment has a more desirable outcome. Is that really what you want me to do? If not can you help me understand how to achieve what you are asking?
Also even if you can’t ask your advisor, maybe there is someone else with authority you could ask
When two people are arguing with just opinions, the senior person assumes their choice is valid. At least for me, this was frustrating as I felt my opinions are not given any respect.
Yup, it is the result of the profit motive. I think thanks to the Internet there has become a lot LESS respect for all kinds of views. Every blogger who has comments below can receive pushback. It wasn’t the case when people were simply publishing books with references.
I have taken advantage of this to some extent by interviewing some of the top people in what I am interested in. “Freedom of association”. I didnt even bother posting the videos as public, they are often unlisted.
Tim Berners-Lee
Noam Chomsky
Inventor of Freenet
Grandson of Milton Friedman
The author of Regulation S
Richard Heart from Hex
And so forth. A random assortment of people. Also people building new movements:
Andrew Yang
Tulsi Gabbard
Brock Pierce
Ben Swann
In general, I think people trust institutions less now, including scientists. Look at RFK Jr on Joe Rogan challenging the prevailin establishment on the coronavirus, etc.
Academia nowadays is a hyper-competitive hellhole.
> In my experience, the best organization are the ones that are willing to get bottom up feedback.
Yes, and those are distributed about equally everywhere. What changes is the impact of the bad ones.
Anyway, a clear sign you are in one of the good places is that people don't keep asking you "yes/no" questions.
My career has been seriously hampered by quitting a particular project early in my PhD. That project was intractable as far as I'm concerned. My PhD supervisor never treated me the same after quitting that project. I had to get advice from a third-party in my department to get my PhD supervisor to agree to let me graduate. My PhD supervisor refuses to provide me a reference now.
I wasn't able to get a research job immediately after my PhD, and worked as an underpaid bureaucrat (not doing research) for about 2 years before starting my current government contractor research position. My job security is comparable to that of a postdoc and I have worse benefits than most postdocs, but I am paid better.
I recently applied to a job at a national lab, and I could tell that the interviewer was alarmed when I said that my PhD supervisor refuses to provide me a reference.
The important difference between academia/research and non-research industry is that while saying no can jeopardize your current job in both cases, in academia/research saying no is far more likely to jeopardize your future jobs due to the heavy reliance on detailed reference checks.
the adage "people don't leave companies, they leave managers" is simply not a thing that can happen without risking your entire carreer.
In retrospect, it would have been better for me to switch PhD supervisors or quit academia entirely.
The problem is with the structure of academia in my view. Disagreements are inevitable, but don't make someone unemployable because of them.
Have you asked him?
Humans have made incredible advancements in our understanding of the universe, yet we still have a starkly incompetent understanding of how to measure who is fit to hold power.
This environment forces you to just give them the results that they like to see, even if the results are not scientifically accurate. It’s as if the goal is not to do science, but to publish and tell an interesting story in your papers.
You might say: “well, just ignore them and do your own thing”, but unfortunately in academia so much depends on how people like you. Without good recommendation letters, citations, and networking, you can’t really go far in your academic career. I’ve seen people who couldn’t get their tenure after several years because of this.
It makes me sad but unfortunately this is the truth I discovered only recently. Had I had known about it, I’d stick to industry jobs.
I might make myself feel better by reminding myself that almost no one will ever read academic papers in my field, but at the end of the day, I’m still struggling with this dilemma: do the right and scientific thing and ruin my future in academia, or do what my peers are doing and make senior faculty like me.