This seems like it’s good advice for someone trying to become a career researcher, but is it really best to have so many career researchers? The prototypical physics grad student (more than a couple of my friends are those so I may just have a biased perspective) starts off with courageous ideas about how he’s going to push science forward and restructure physics. But then he encounters the rigamarole of the whole process you describe in your post and it stops him from doing what he originally dreamed. He needs to get published. He needs to do original research. He needs to help his advisor and other professors do their research. He needs to do all of that because otherwise he won’t be respected enough to actually have a career in physics research. But doing that kind of work isn’t why he got into physics in the first place!
So the typical grad student either realizes that accomplishing his goal of restructuring quantum mechanics isn’t in line with the practical necessity of having a career or he gets shunted out of academia because there’s 100 other students who optimized their behavior towards becoming researchers and they all look better on paper than him. If none of the grad students optimized towards becoming career researchers and instead really focused on what’s important to them this problem wouldn’t exist, but the incentives are misaligned and it takes just a few defectors to force everybody else into defecting too.
The method you analogize to a gravity turn is highly optimized to turn grad students into career researchers, but it isn’t optimized at all to push science forward in any meaningful way. The gravity turn analogy romanticizes the whole career researcher situation. Playing the game: becoming a respected researcher so you can earn a paycheck, have the respect of your colleagues, and occasionally do some effective work, that’s not the dream.
But then he encounters the rigamarole of the whole process you describe in your post and it stops him from doing what he originally dreamed. He needs to get published. He needs to do original research. He needs to help his advisor and other professors do their research. He needs to do all of that because otherwise he won’t be respected enough to actually have a career in physics research. But doing that kind of work isn’t why he got into physics in the first place!
I’m confused about the claim that the academic process is at all misaligned with his original dream. Isn’t doing original research and getting published the clearest path—though perhaps not the only one—on the way to the goal of restructuring quantum mechanics? Isn’t helping his advisor and other professors do their research one of the best ways of learning the ropes in the meantime? Isn’t acquiring the respect of your colleagues exactly the path to having a whole community and field at your back to effect those paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, instead of going it alone?
They may or may not be instrumental in achieving the original goal, but they’re not the goal and certainly not the envisioned process. That’s regardless of whether the original process was ever realistic.
In particular the process toward “having a whole community and field at your back” is about 95% politics, not research, and requires a very different mindset and skill set than actually doing research.
Is “politics” here the mind-killer, or does it just mean getting to know people and participating in the research community? Because unless you’re going to be a hermit and produce jewels that the world will spontaneously beat a path to your door for, the latter is an integral part of not just a career, but of a life.
I’m referring to political skills. While many of these are also generally useful in life, many (often the same ones) are primarily of value for negotiating moral mazes in ways that are detrimental to interpersonal relationships and sometimes even society in general.
It is often true that the latter skills are an integral part of life, but that doesn’t make them any less distasteful to someone who wants to make the world a better place in some way.
No I don’t think the academic process is aligned with making paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. Scott Alexander wrote a good piece that address this question. His purpose was to rebut the notion that modern scientists are way less efficient than their historical counterparts. I generally agree with his conclusion that the modern academic research apparatus isn’t hampering scientific advancement in any way that would affect the trendlines. Yet I think he also cites a lot of good evidence which rebuts the opposite notion: that academic research has done anything positive for scientific advancement. Although Scott himself doesn’t come to that conclusion.
Most of the examples of paradigm shifting work I can think of came from giving people who were very smart a large stipend of money to live off of and allowing them to research what they wanted (Newton, Liebniz, even Einstein counts as working as a patent examiner essentially gave him a stipend and an office where he got to do thought experiments). The other similar effective method is getting a lot of smart people working together, give them a bunch of money of course, and also give them a goal to accomplish within a few years (i.e. Manhattan Project, cryptography protocols).
Money and smart people seems to be a good baseline for what’s required for scientific advancement. Academic research has a lot of money and smart people that’s for sure! But it also has a lot of other features, the features you describe in your post, and it’s not clear to me that they actually do anything. Based on historical evidence it seems that if we gave research grants to smart and personable university graduates and gave them carte blanche to do with the money what they wished that would work just as well as the current system.
if we gave research grants to smart and personable university graduates and gave them carte blanche to do with the money what they wished that would work just as well as the current system
This thought is not unique to you; see e.g. the French CNRS system. My impression is that it works kind of as you would expect; a lot of them go on to do solid work, some do great work, and a few stop working after a couple of years. Of course we can not really know how things would have turned out if the same people had been given more conventional positions,
This seems like it’s good advice for someone trying to become a career researcher, but is it really best to have so many career researchers? The prototypical physics grad student (more than a couple of my friends are those so I may just have a biased perspective) starts off with courageous ideas about how he’s going to push science forward and restructure physics. But then he encounters the rigamarole of the whole process you describe in your post and it stops him from doing what he originally dreamed. He needs to get published. He needs to do original research. He needs to help his advisor and other professors do their research. He needs to do all of that because otherwise he won’t be respected enough to actually have a career in physics research. But doing that kind of work isn’t why he got into physics in the first place!
So the typical grad student either realizes that accomplishing his goal of restructuring quantum mechanics isn’t in line with the practical necessity of having a career or he gets shunted out of academia because there’s 100 other students who optimized their behavior towards becoming researchers and they all look better on paper than him. If none of the grad students optimized towards becoming career researchers and instead really focused on what’s important to them this problem wouldn’t exist, but the incentives are misaligned and it takes just a few defectors to force everybody else into defecting too.
The method you analogize to a gravity turn is highly optimized to turn grad students into career researchers, but it isn’t optimized at all to push science forward in any meaningful way. The gravity turn analogy romanticizes the whole career researcher situation. Playing the game: becoming a respected researcher so you can earn a paycheck, have the respect of your colleagues, and occasionally do some effective work, that’s not the dream.
I’m confused about the claim that the academic process is at all misaligned with his original dream. Isn’t doing original research and getting published the clearest path—though perhaps not the only one—on the way to the goal of restructuring quantum mechanics? Isn’t helping his advisor and other professors do their research one of the best ways of learning the ropes in the meantime? Isn’t acquiring the respect of your colleagues exactly the path to having a whole community and field at your back to effect those paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, instead of going it alone?
They may or may not be instrumental in achieving the original goal, but they’re not the goal and certainly not the envisioned process. That’s regardless of whether the original process was ever realistic.
In particular the process toward “having a whole community and field at your back” is about 95% politics, not research, and requires a very different mindset and skill set than actually doing research.
Is “politics” here the mind-killer, or does it just mean getting to know people and participating in the research community? Because unless you’re going to be a hermit and produce jewels that the world will spontaneously beat a path to your door for, the latter is an integral part of not just a career, but of a life.
I’m referring to political skills. While many of these are also generally useful in life, many (often the same ones) are primarily of value for negotiating moral mazes in ways that are detrimental to interpersonal relationships and sometimes even society in general.
It is often true that the latter skills are an integral part of life, but that doesn’t make them any less distasteful to someone who wants to make the world a better place in some way.
No I don’t think the academic process is aligned with making paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. Scott Alexander wrote a good piece that address this question. His purpose was to rebut the notion that modern scientists are way less efficient than their historical counterparts. I generally agree with his conclusion that the modern academic research apparatus isn’t hampering scientific advancement in any way that would affect the trendlines. Yet I think he also cites a lot of good evidence which rebuts the opposite notion: that academic research has done anything positive for scientific advancement. Although Scott himself doesn’t come to that conclusion.
Most of the examples of paradigm shifting work I can think of came from giving people who were very smart a large stipend of money to live off of and allowing them to research what they wanted (Newton, Liebniz, even Einstein counts as working as a patent examiner essentially gave him a stipend and an office where he got to do thought experiments). The other similar effective method is getting a lot of smart people working together, give them a bunch of money of course, and also give them a goal to accomplish within a few years (i.e. Manhattan Project, cryptography protocols).
Money and smart people seems to be a good baseline for what’s required for scientific advancement. Academic research has a lot of money and smart people that’s for sure! But it also has a lot of other features, the features you describe in your post, and it’s not clear to me that they actually do anything. Based on historical evidence it seems that if we gave research grants to smart and personable university graduates and gave them carte blanche to do with the money what they wished that would work just as well as the current system.
This thought is not unique to you; see e.g. the French CNRS system. My impression is that it works kind of as you would expect; a lot of them go on to do solid work, some do great work, and a few stop working after a couple of years. Of course we can not really know how things would have turned out if the same people had been given more conventional positions,