Comment by jp57
2 days ago
...and just like that, the reproducibility crisis is forgotten.
Seriously, it's amazing how fast we can go from "man, scientific research sure is a mess, wtf are all these people doing anyway?" to "How dare you mess with the status quo?!"
It's worth remembering that American academic science has for years been training far more grad students than they could ever hope to eventually give tenure to, or even place in tenure track jobs (only to be denied at the last step). Instead, PhD graduates spend years working in the precariat of "soft-funding". The result is a desperate publish-or-perish culture that leads to all the ills we see so often on the HN front page: unreproducible results, p-hacking, etc.
This entire toxic environment is created and sustained by universities that demand that their faculty have independently funded research programs, that put a third or more of their grant funds into the university general fund via indirect fees.
This is the status quo that is being disrupted. It is pretty reasonable to assume that the majority of young researchers whose careers are getting derailed were not going to make tenure or publish anything anyway, and they have in fact been done a favor.
The counterargument to this is that we should deliberately fund many researchers who we know will never actually produce anything useful because that's how we find the few actual geniuses who will produce useful things. There is something to this argument, but we should be clear up front to the students about their true prospects.
Usually, when something is broken the correct course of action is to fix it, not demolish it utterly.
Academia is tough, and things are bad enough to complain about it.
However, you have (understandably) fallen in a trap of rationalization. This is not an earnest effort to improve. As it stands now, the damage of the conservative rage is measured in decades needed for repair. As in: the intended effect.
I have linked it a few times, but I am happy to do it once more, because I can surely understand the genuine confusion people have about these things:
https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103517-001-A/capitalism-in-ame...
If the problem is, as I posit that it is, that universities cynically exploit cheap labor in the form of grad students and postdocs in order to keep indirect funds flowing into the universities' accounts', then many earnest efforts to improve would necessarily involve putting a lot of researchers out of work, and that improvement would be a good thing.
My issue is with the uncritical defense of the status quo in both the article and most of the comments. Though I suppose I can understand the impulse for scientists to say that the field's problems are internal, to be dealt with internally, and that the government needs to just give the money they ask for and not make any effort to see or change how the sausage is made.
The status quo is not in focus, let alone I would defend it. Your concerns about the status quo are really valid imho, how they should be dealt with would be an interesting other subject, but they are not a concern for the conservative movement, nor are there any signs one could expect even unintended good consequences. As such, as well-intending you might be, it only adds to confusion.
The bad consequences are, from a historical perspective, the least of a surprise.
"This programme is not available in your country." (i.e. USA) Oh the irony. You'll have to make the argument yourself, I guess.
I think the broadcast license is restricted to EUR area. Proton vpn is free though. I recommend to take the hassle, it is a great historical documentary in three parts.