Strawman scientist?

> “Yes. Now, let’s see. It’s an amazing, visionary proposal, a great collaboration, and congratulations on pulling it together. I just have one question” said the director “This proposal will generate a huge amount of data – how do you plan to deal with it all?”

“Oh that’s easy!” answered Smith. “It’s all on page 6. We’ve requested funds to employ a bioinformatician for the lifetime of the project. They’ll deal with all of the data” he stated, triumphantly.

I dunno...this sounds like a problematic mindset across many, many domains in science. What makes the field of biology less prone to it?

The "strawman scientist" has tenure--I'm sure they can take it.

Given the behavior and stories of lots of PIs and advisors, and how they treat grad students these days (especially in biology and medicine), I'm not sure that we need to be sticking up for them.

As someone who's worked with micro biologists I can assure you it's not a straw man.

As someone who has worked with microbiologists, maybe you could start by spelling microbiologist right.

Maybe you could not be a cunt

It's a thought experiment, not a critique of all scientists. I can definitely see elements of that straw man in some scientists that I have met.

Okay, but what is the point of the thought experiment? If the point is, as the addendum at the bottom indicates, to convince scientists to support a bioinformatics group rather than having their own bioinformatician, the same arguments and reasoning the post shows could've been presented without the whole "you're not allowed bioinformatics" framing device, which is certainly attention-getting but far less likely to be persuasive because you're behaving confrontationally towards the very people you're trying to persuade.

Read the essay that inspired this essay (linked), published by some little British journal, (Nature, I think?). The point is to express a similar frustration.