Early in my career, I considered (with an MS in Electrical Engineering, but with 4 years of professional programming experience) a switch into law. Big firms hire (or did in the past) people with tech degrees to do patent work and will pay a salary plus pay for law school.

When I joined the big firm, there were about 25 people in my role. I was the only with with an EE or CS degree/background, the only one without a PhD, and the only one with actual post-academic work experience. For me, it was a 10% pay cut before accounting for law school tuition, similar benefits, and an small increase in hours. For all of the PhDs, it was essentially a 100% raise, substantially less work, and superior benefits.

I've never heard this before. What job title would you search for?

If you're looking for a job like that with Big Law, you might look for "litigation advisor" or something similar.

For example: https://foleyhoag.com/careers/technology-specialists/ (note, this is the firm where I did that work)

And ofcourse the Titans of social media - zuckerberg, chamath, tiktok and 1000s of engineers, PMs will not pay for the harm their engineered products have caused because waters have been muddied enough and no true accounting of the harm can happen.

It is kind of like inventing a new synthetic highly addictive drug which is technically legal but very harmful and you can sell it to everyone.

You don't need Facebook or the Gram to be keenly aware that all your university buddies who went into tech are going on vacations to Maui and buying their second homes, while you're still grinding your life away for nothing in a university lab. In fact, all you need to do be aware of this is to show up to your friends' bi-weekly happy hour at the local.

No, it's not. Social media created a world wide bullying environment. Most of people all over the world are in trouble because they have to compete with unrealistic image of you or your profession created by social media. Whatever you are or do, you are never good enough. Education, medical field and science are especially vulnerable in this regard.

Tech sector isn't really exception, but insane amount of money people get in some parts of the world for compensation makes it more tolerable.

Social media might make this disparity obvious and in your face, but it did not create it.

There are a handful of academics who are truly built for working in academia and wouldn't be as successful in "the industry" but at least half could transition out of academia and clean-up with a normal office job.

There's a regular story told in physics departments that if you leave you can't get back in. But in my experience, maybe people leave and don't want to go back.

At least in CS, becoming a Professor of Practice is both higher prestige and a much lower barrier to entry than becoming an Associate Professor with Tenure. The job security of the Professor of Practice is de jure weaker but de facto much stronger. (Tenure doesn't mean shit these days, especially in the USA.)

> But in my experience, maybe people leave and don't want to go back.

Bingo. And it becomes way more extreme by the year.

After a couple decades in the tech industry with a modest lifestyle, 4.3% on your entirely post-tax brokerage account comes damn close to paying a full professor's salary. Retirement at 45 ain't a bad gig.

Get bored? No problem. Move somewhere nice close to a good-but-not-top-10-R1 university.

Teaching can be fun. You can always ad junct if and only you get the bug. Most departments are extremely happy because the customers LOVE being taught by people who did the real thing.

Research is similar: if you find a student you really enjoy working with or an idea you really want to pursue, you can opt to write a grant or take an industry gig for a bit. Student's choice -- chill poverty or same work but with weekly standups and more meetings and 5x comp. Again, the customers LOVE being able to tell Congress they are funding real stuff.

And you don't have to sit in faculty meetings where a bunch of people pretend that their grant agencies and students aren't customers, or that their department chair and dean aren't their line manager and skip line manager, or that their PhD students aren't criminally underpaid direct reports.

Overall, it's nice to be able to clip coupons on bonds and have uni admin fawning over you. It beats the alternative of the tenure track, where you have to continue wage slaving at a university whose admin has been totally MBAified and can't really offer your direct reports much in the way of solidarity because there are 100 28 year olds who can also be PIs on military-industrial projects interspersed with the occasional NSF/NIH grant.

If that's a good reason to keep pay low, why don't we apply this to the management and administrative class? Surely, we could find someone smart and capable who'd be happy to do an exec's or a director's job, without seven-figure pay as a consideration...

Think of all the money we could return to shareholders, if we just made the directors subsist on prayers and ramen...

We do, depending on domain. Directors in a lot of social programs make low pay for what they deal with. Luckily, many are mission oriented rather than being motivated primarily by money.

Consider that preparing you for jobs outside of university should be the goal of your education, not relegated to a two-day seminar.

And also consider how relatively fucked it is that such a seminar is actually quite necessary due to the fact that the vast majority of your faculty haven't spent more than a trivial amount of time in industry. (Things that don't count as non-trivial industry experience include: the gap year between undergrad and grad school, the one year industry Post-Doc, sporatic consulting, the "spinoff" that never got past a seed round in which the university endowment or SBIR was the lead "investor", or especially the "several internships at top companies" lol.)

If you want to do anything else just get a masters

This is vague to the point of meaninglessness. To wit, consider the following questions:

1. What is "Research"? (In PhD school the de facto answer is "whatever things get published in top conferences")

2. What does it mean to "learn how to do Research"? (I argue the most important skill is knowing which questions to ask, but that's not something that PhD students or even Professors every get to actually do -- your funding agency's friendly managers/directors will clearly articulate the set of questions you are permitted to ask during Proposer's Day workshops.)

All of that to say: learning how to do "Research" is the goal that students are told they're supposed to have. The actual goal of a PhD program is to generate income from overhead on grants. This has a nice side benefit of occasionally producing valuable licensing revenue streams. That anyone learns anything is a happy coincidence.

1) Have an entirely separate life outside of academia. Do not mix the two, maintain a strict separation, and keep all academic relationships strictly professional.

2) Don't think of your advisor as anything other than an employer. They're not a father figure or a mentor or anything like that. You're just cheap labor, and don't forget it.

3) Don't think of you university as a 'place of learning and research' - they've all been corporatized to the hilt, and are basically run on the same lines as any business entity, including the worst aspects of corporate HR.

4) If you do have mental health issues, absolutely never go to anyone like a university-affiliated therapist, etc. If you ever have a dispute with the university, they'll use any such interaction in an effort to discredit you.

5) Fraudulent manipulation of data is more common than not as is dishonest behavior by PIs, and if your data from your own research doesn't agree with their past work, they'll try to prevent it from getting published and otherwise sabotage your progress, so expect that.

6) Academic politics is among the nastiest that exists, and enemies of your PI will also happily sabotage your progress just to make your PI look bad. Even other grad students might try something like this, so trust noone (and see #1).

7) If you have any really brilliant ideas with commercial potential, don't say a word about it to anyone, don't write it down, because the university will claim that it owns all your IP and will demand a percentage of anything you do with it, so keep quiet until you've left the system.

You can learn a lot if you get into the right situation, however. Careful vetting of any prospective research group is important in that respect.

As you can imagine some people do great with it but I'm also aware of some catastrophes.

I like to think that our relationship, where we're free to vent about our work but also talk about and enjoy lots of other things, helps to keep us both mentally healthy.

Self-awareness is good but less impressive when they're still charging universities obscene amounts to access material the journal obtained basically for free.

(He says as he writes his thesis and prepares to start his postdoc.)

NSF grants are hard to get, with a small award being for about $600K over 3 years. That translates to about $300K after the university takes its overhead. For me, that would about fund about two PhD students for 3 years for about $31K per year during the 9 month academic year. Many PhD students in computer science do internships during summer where they make a lot larger salaries, or they are funded by me for that period instead.

In my city, Rochester, according to this website, our stipends are the most generous in the USA based on the low cost of living here. https://csstipendrankings.org/

We would all like to pay students more, but either we then have fewer students or need the government to award larger grants. As someone who had a hard time getting into a PhD program due to how competitive it is, I would be opposed to depriving folks of educational opportunities.

Students typically take classes and do little research for their first 1-2 years, but they do receive a stipend during that time period.

All reward and prestige of being a researcher has been lost and the people in the study have a slim chance of being able to work with their degree.

Which I understand is about the opposite of what this article wants, but you shouldn't trust the people who have broken science to fix it. Research itself gets locked behind tightly walled journals and are written with obscure and difficult language laymen can't understand, peer review has become a hoop jumping scam that let's bad research through.

Medical review and other ethics boards are suffocating the ability for researchers to actually do things in a massive overcorrection from the early days of research.

Media is in a continuous game of misrepresentation of everything researchers say and trust in scientific truth had lead to instructional actors getting their fingers in the process and corrupting it to suit their ends.

ARXIV and the likes are the future of science. Where literal discord servers are getting together to publish studies. Yeah. Bunk gets published all the time, but peer review can just happen dynamically through good old regular unchecked skepticism.

I would never in a billion years engage in the academic side of research. If I wanted to be a scientist I'd do it as a hobby, buying the tools to do it in my garage and publishing to open journals where ethics boards and bureaucrats cannot touch me beyond the reach of actual law.

In all hopes, academia will start to crumble and this sort of garage philosophy will grow into a network of people that replaces it with a fresher and more dynamic outlook.

I'm frankly tired of science being characterized in terms of competitiveness and abuse. That's true, but it's deeper than that. It is now structurally corrupt, in the sense that nominal credit does not reflect actual contributions and results are often questionable or even fraudulent, and the incentives are structured to reward collecting new data that are very predictable rather than new ideas or exploring unknowns.

The characterization of science as just being "stressful" or "competitive", as opposed to being broken and corrupt, does disservice and deflects from real change by implicitly putting the responsibility on those who are affected the most.

It's as if you had a city full of crime, white collar as well as otherwise, and then discussed the problems in terms of victims being anxious, rather than the fact there's no police in the the city and the court system is corrupt.

New people and outsiders still have so much hope for what the paths they choose offer them and once they enter and progress are faced with the "city full of crime...(with) no police" and very little recourse. Engineers that are berated and bullied to output test results that conform to desired product specs, management that wants data that conforms to "projected" trends and bully analysts to "massage" the data accordingly, chefs that are told they have to work 12-16hr 5-6 days a week. These are just the examples that I have personal experience with.

It seems that this structural corruption has everything to do with financial rewards and who holds the purse strings. The group/s that dole out the rewards seem to have played their hand miraculously and convinced everyone that this is the only way.

As I write this it reminds me of threads I was reading 10 years ago about surgery and surgeons and what it took to become apart of that field. It was described as being fraught with super high stress, high precision, high physically demands such as super long shifts (24-48hrs) lack of sleep, and a huge drop out rate. So many of the posters from the industry were saying while it was toxic and terrible it produced world class surgeons and that culture of training and gatekeeping was what kept the profession the best in world.

Would you say that possibly the people maintaining the "structurally corrupt" culture are doing it to maintain a perceived superiority and relevance both financially and socially? What about the political winds constantly undermining the output of the profession when it becomes politically expedient to do so? Do you have any ideas on what change would look like? What are some of the solutions that you and your friends have discussed?

I had so much disgust for the field since then.

And for outcomes, the paper in question was retracted and the professor involved resigned. However, I haven't seen updates regarding the review ring (where a bunch of peer reviewers collude).

https://retractionwatch.com/2021/03/16/after-grad-student-su...

https://www.wuft.org/news/2021/04/23/university-of-florida-p...

This is my experience as well, after working in many different departments. It's really sad. I could hardly summarize it better.

Rather, it was very basic stuff, like being told to come in at 5:30AM to feed a cell line only to have the PI show up at 2PM, throw the experiment in the garbage, threaten the student's livelihood, and then demand they stay until 11:30PM redoing the experiment. Over and over again, at random intervals.

I asked around about this stuff because a family member now works in the field and had some startling experiences, only to find that this is apparently almost universal, and that what I'm describing is on the lighter end of it. There are stories about labs at elite universities where the grad students have set up secluded spaces to go hide from their PIs and cry. It's everything you've heard about working as a developer at a video game company, dialed up to 11.

The fact it's a monster that eats people alive to me is an evidence that the whole thing needs to be torn down and replaced, which is the best way to erase all these sorts of harms.

But this isn't about today's scientists. I fully expect a collapse of academia to harm anyone currently in it, because the skills you need to succeed will change dramatically

It is easy to tear down but hard to build.

I get that you are jaded, but tearing down institutional science is just going to harm future scientists by robbing them of opportunity. Yes the system isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean we have to throw it in the trash in its entirety.

In this case, it seems like the Opportunity is an opportunity to get trapped in a system that is likely to be both unsatisfactory and unproductive.

My fear is that we've crossed the event horizon and we can't rollback all the alterations that accumulated over the years and gotten academics into a cul-de-sac or box canyon. (Pick your metaphor...) next stop, the singularity, where we will have the opportunity to experience life as a dimensionless point...

Most science requires specialized tools and materials that cannot be obtained outside of an institutional environment. Tearing down the institutions means ceasing basically all non-profit generating "big science" efforts. That robs future scientists of working on the cutting edge.

A garage lab is fun idea, but the reality is infeasible in most circumstances. Even if possible, it will be slap-shod and a gigantic money pit that no granting agency will give a dime to.

>My fear is that we've crossed the event horizon

Hyperbole. Science existed before institutions and will exist after if it all should come tumbling down. There are more scientists than there has ever been, and as a result a lot of "boring" but necessary science is happening, but that doesn't mean there aren't rebels and outlaws in that same system asking interesting questions and overturning ideas.

A lot of folks talk about how hard it is to find a tenure track job but it's actually trivial for anyone in the 99th percentile of all 3 categories.

But for anyone with that combination of talents, they can easily make 7 figures in a comfortable job outside of academia so not many of them apply even at the Stanfords and Harvards of the world.

Why do you think this is so? Is it because technical skills are more easily measurable and thus more defensible than so-called “soft skills”?

I think it goes without saying that most 99 percentilers can get the job of their choosing within that skillset. My question is more about the ranked priorities of the rest of the "middling" candidates. Why is the value system is structured to reward one type of skills when everyone seems to conclude it doesn’t provide good outcomes?

Whereas everyone on a hiring committee can tell quite quickly if a prospective applicant is blowing smoke about their technical skills, competence at navigating academia, etc...

This is the same dynamic everywhere when multiple qualities are valued but only some of those qualities are easy to quantify or assess.

If you’re interviewing with a group of mathematicians, there’s a greater likelihood they will consider math skills to be the Ine Important Thing, in part because they’ve had to focus on that so much it becomes disproportionately important in their worldview. It’s a bias due to being overly focused on a specialization.

I don't see where you drew the distinction, can you point it out?

How does the possibility of mathematicians being narrow minded in your second paragraph relate to this distinction?

>"I think one of the problems in academia is that specialization requires people to forgo learning those traits, and they revert to what they’re comfortable evaluating (because it’s also what they specialize in)"

There's a distinction in avoiding a measure because it's not quantifiable and just plain not feeling as comfortable in that domain.

>How does the possibility of mathematicians being narrow minded in your second paragraph relate to this distinction?

When you're a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Humans tend to be cognitively lazy, so they revert to what they know when faced with uncertainty. E.g., a mathematician feels more comfortable measuring math skills, even though a better measure may be a combination of math and leadership skills. So they tend to hire quants with poor management traits. It doesn't mean they couldn't evaluate the soft skills, it means they chose not to.

Using a different analogy, if you asked a sprinter to choose a decathlete, what skills do you think they would more heavily weight in their evaluation? I'm saying it's likely they would more heavily weight the sprinting events because they don't know how to evaluate the other events as well. They specialize in sprinting, after all, and that's what they know and feel comfortable with. The result probably isn't going to select the best overall decathlete, but it doesn't mean the other events couldn't be measured.

The place to start is by having far fewer PhD students, but more masters students and technicians. A 60% reduction in PhD student numbers would reflect job opportunities, and student aptitude, more accurately.

E.g. there’s increasingly an expectation that students should come into a PhD program with one or more publications already under their belt. For top programs ideally these should be first author (not yet an absolute requirement but it’s more important each year).

So you better get a good research assistant job as an undergrad so you can do that. It has to be early enough in undergrad that you have time to get the paper out before applying to grad school. So you need to be prepared to get a professor to work with you freshman/sophomore year…

So you have to have evidence of skills basically coming in to undergrad. Either be really brilliant and stand out in class, or, better, have some experience in high school to make you credible…

These pressures would only increase with fewer PhD slots. Maybe that’s fine long term but it does have a distorting effect on people’s lives if you have to make high stakes decisions that early.

There is such a lack of permanent research positions compared to postdocs and PhD students that I'm not even sure it's selecting for the best people.

on top of this you also filter out anyone who doesn't perfectly stay on this high-stakes pipeline from age 14 to tenure, which is probably not good overall for science.

economics is actually pretty close to working this way already. indeed, the job market for economics PhDs is much less dystopian than say life sciences. but there are tradeoffs.

1. The institution in question evaluates candidates as either a fit or not a fit. 2. The candidates who fit are the pool from which the positions are filled at random.

Obviously it's gameable as stated, but I think if I spent a day or two designing a better mechanism with the same premise, we'd end up with great candidates but without the hyperoptimization trap.

This is something I discovered pretty late in my life. The web pages maintained by profs barely have any info.

I have come to hate the whole "everybody looks for different things" type of answer when it comes to PhD apps. I wish profs would just spell it out on their site in concrete terms what they personally look for.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/gradschooltalk.pdf

In other fields and lower ranked programs, again I wish profs would be explicit (since publications might not be expected).

Like this guy:http://math.stanford.edu/~vakil/potentialstudents.html

"So before I take you on as a new student, you should be comfortable with the foundations of the subject, which means having done the majority of the exercises in Hartshorne or my course notes, and being able to explain them on demand."

That is very explicit and sets clear expectations.

Academia isn't the only career path for those with a PhD (I worked in industry and at NASA as well), and I think students should be taught that early on. I think we deny the opportunity to learn how to conduct research to too many people due to limited resources.

Regarding student aptitude, that's hard to measure. Already we highly prioritize students who have already published as undergraduates. If we do more to ensure student aptitude, it would hurt those who may excel but were held back by a lack of mentorship during their undergraduates in how to get into a PhD program. This would also negatively impact efforts to increase diversity in science as well.

The problem is the gatekeepers such as journal corps profit from the artificial scarcity they create. There's no reason for them to only publish a certain number of "papers" in the paperless world.

The problem is you also see this behavior in well established lab, where the PI has very little to lose if he quits research altogether.

In my experience, the correlation with whether the professor was an assistant professor seeking tenure vs a well established full professor and the amount of work they make PhD students do is almost nil. It's mostly purely driven by the will of the PI, not the demands of the funding situation. A lot of professors choose to have few graduate students so they don't have to stress too much about funding.

Remember: Once you get tenure, your job is not at risk if your research output is low (although it does affect compensation). If you get a $1M grant and end up with no research papers out of it, there is no accountability - except the granting agency will deprioritize you in the future (if even that).

If you're seeking an advisor, ask his/her current students what life is like. Also find people who graduated under him/her and ask them.

With an assistant prof you will be asked to do unreasonably long hours on ideas that haven't been fully validated, but you get a lot of face-time with the PI (for better or worse) and have a chance to get on the ground floor of a potentially great research program. Your boss has a lot more invested in your success because their career depends more on you. It can be exciting.

With a more established prof you are more likely be plugged into the n-th iteration of an established research program. You're more expendable because the prof has more options to hire your replacement; you can get lost in the crowd; the prof won't be in the lab as much (travel, service responsibilities) so it's more sink or swim. Lots can go wrong in this environment. As the group gets larger, internal politics can create frictions, especially if the supervisor is away a lot.

I see A) as better than B) but that is just me.

These can be the saddest cases in my opinion. Lower downside, but lower upside too. You work your butt off and knock the ball out of the park with your project: who notices? A few experts, in a very narrow field, may recognize the significance of what you've done. Can be lonely.

The part that doesn't fit is their PIs being continuously abusive, or, worse, destructive: the PI's goals are ostensibly those of a supposed startup founder, to drive a team to the redline to get something delivered in an unreasonably short period of time, fair enough. But PIs deliberately fuck things up, disrupt experiments, chase team members out of the lab for no apparent reason, berate team members to the point where they can't be productive.

The culture is much more reminiscent of a 1980s fine dining restaurant kitchen than of a startup. The chef paid his dues, and if having a pot half-filled with hot stock thrown at his head was something he had to deal with, by god, so will his line cooks and stages.

One got tenure and became more mellow in a relative sense. The other was subsequently unable to attract any more graduate students to their lab, and left for another, slightly less prestigious institution.

I am also familiar with one case of graduate students resigning en masse, leaving a PI with a hollowed-out research group of 2-3 that they had to rebuild. Prof had a subsequent attitude adjustment.

In all these cases the stories spread pretty quickly and profs realized that there were costs to abusive behavior. These stories pre-date social media BTW.

Developers, like scientists, are very outcome driven (number of lines, number of features, RoI, ...)

The only - very big difference - is pay.

I've known maths PhD students who found they could only really do 2-3 hours of truly productive maths in a day, allowing them to spend the rest of the day playing games and suchlike, and after two years their supervisor told them they'd got enough interesting results to graduate.

And I've known chemistry PhD students whose supervisors felt if you're doing a mere 8 hours a day of work you might as well drop out now because you're obviously not serious about graduating, and expected their students to be in the lab tending to long-running experiments on evenings, weekends and even christmas day. And yes, we only give you three years of funding but everyone takes four years to graduate.

Adding to that, a large portion of (important) wet bench work is mind-numbing manual labor. This work really should be done by a tech, but techs are just as if not more expensive than grad students, and techs can leave the job if they're not happy. Which means that grad students are at the bottom of the totem pole of intellectual respect, and PIs who had to do the same expect a lot more "due paying".

Meanwhile, students in computational labs are working from home.

…at some labs. There’re many-many places with good PIs, decent funding, retreats, events, etc. I don’t get why people paint it as black and white.

Academic jobs are nothing like that.

If a single research job is toxic, that's stressful in the short term, but will just motivate someone to leave eventually; stress relieved.

If the entire 'industry' is toxic, there's no job change that can relieve the stress. Also, research jobs are attained after people make some hard-to-reverse decisions about money, time investment, and lifestyle. If someone is in loads of student debt, has spent a decade learning a very niche topic that can't be easily leveraged elsewhere and doesn't have enough money to just quit and be okay, it's easy to see where the stress comes from, and it doesn't seem easily resolved.

Social media is a big part of it, but from what I’ve seen it’s not in the way people usually describe it. The most unhappy people I see aren’t the ones talking to their friends on Instagram and Facebook during their lunch break. To be honest, those people seem to be thriving socially simply by virtue of keeping up with their friends and coordinating social activities.

The most unhappy people I see are the ones consuming hours of Reddit and Twitter every day. They have a never ending stream of ragebait, outrage headlines, tragedy stories, and world-is-ending stories filling their feeds. They’re also filled with unreasonable expectations about the workplace.

In recent years multiple juniors have confidently told me that “nobody can do more than about 2 hours of work per day”, citing Reddit or Twitter threads that explain it. Then they get into a real job that requires a full day of work and feel like they’re being taken advantage of. I’ve had a concerning number of conversations with juniors who are getting paid $120K or more to do entry level work with great mentoring at a local company, only to be outraged at some idea that the industry is taking advantage of them because they haven’t been promoted to senior with $300K total comp after their first year. The source of these expectations is always some form of social media (Reddit, Blind, Twitter)

I don’t know how this translates to academic contexts because that’s not my mentoring domain. I imagine it’s at least contributing, though. That said, academic environments are known to be grueling so it’s not entirely a singular issue. They really are grueling.

> Stanford, MIT

I see this attitude often and... I just don't get it. It seems innumerate at best.

MIT accepts around 500 students and Stanford accepts around 2,000 students. There's overlap between those two groups, but let's assume they are entirely disjoint. That gives us 2,500 seats. Let's round up to 3,000 just for fun.

Last year, around 3 million students graduated from 20,469 high schools. That's 20,469 valedictorians for 3,000 spots.

Last year, 1.7 million students took the SAT. That's 17,000 in the top percentile for 3,000 spots.

The set of valedictorians and set of SAT 99th percentile students probably mostly overlap. (And to the extent that they don't overlap, it's often because valedictorian is a weird game; eg, at both the high school I attended and the high school in my current community it's basically mathematically impossible to win the valedictorian game if you participate in band/orchestra because they aren't honors courses for the first 3 semesters... but, of course, any sane admissions department knows this and will weigh significant involvement in music over two additional honors courses.)

So there are at least 10K students who meet at least your son's (high) bar, all competing for less than 3,000 seats at MIT/Stanford. And that's a conservative estimate. You can add in another 5-10 top schools and the arithmetic is still either impossible for extremely challenging, even if you limit yourself to grades and test scores. And that's with extremely generous assumptions.

But, of course, they competition is far stiffer because a lot of those seats will go to kids who didn't get 4.0s and weren't valedictorians and didn't get 99th percentile SAT scores. But that's because they were spending too much time doing far more impressive things than running up their scores in those categories. Eg doing well at a national science fair, doing well at a national debate or mock trial tournament, winning a major mathematics competition, winning a major writing or art award, doing well nationally in a competitive sport, performing a musical instrument at a very high level, etc.

And those are just the color-inside-the-lines youth competition things. A step up from the "grades and tests" nonsense but still very sand boxy. High school students do a lot of impressive real world stuff as well -- significant open source contributions, significant community development work, publishing peer reviewed scientific articles, etc. Read George Hotz's wiki page -- kids with those sorts of accomplishments apply to places like MIT and Stanford every year. Perfect grades and test scores were criteria that didn't matter much until a candidate was already second or third tier; the difference between 3.8 or even 3.5 and 4.0 just doesn't matter when a seventeen year old already has career accomplishments on their resume that I'd be proud to have at 30. That's just computing. There are wunderkids like that in every field. Lots of them.

And even after all of that we still haven't left the borders of the USA (at MIT, about 10% of undergraduates are international).

> It wasn't like this when I was a teenager in the 80's.

Fewer students went to college. More importantly, systemic barriers to entry -- both informational and cultural -- remained extremely high for most people without WASPy coastal and/or upper-middle-class-suburb backgrounds. The internet eroded a lot of those informational and cultural barriers. Democratizing access to knowledge dramatically increased the efficiency of this market, and that has resulted in much stiffer competition.

> if getting everything nearly perfect isn't enough, what hope does everybody else have?

I really hope that my kids aren't going to aim for elite universities. Having spent a lot of time at both of the institutions you mentioned, I know they can get a great education and almost certainly live a better life without that kind of pressure.

Too bad the people doing the hiring don't know that.

I'm sure there's some weird pompous elitist corporation out there that only pulls from those schools but no one NEEDS to work at those places.

If you're basing your success off of gaining entry into those schools I have to guess you grew up in a very closed off, extremely wealthy area.

Either that or a middle income/upper middle income immigrant community. Often the intersection of the two.

But, yeah. Having worked at several and in the orbit of basically of them: I'm an extreme skeptic of undergraduate prestige factories.

Go to a school with decent resources. That's a MUCH better way to think about it than "decent school", which could mean anything. Want does that mean? Depends on your major.

Once there, be curious. Be voracious. Advocate for yourself. Major it whatever you want. But also make sure at least one of your majors has a lower-risk career track to fall back on. Never, ever accept "prestige" in lieu of either opportunities to grow or earn cold hard $$$. Always remember you live in a capital-ist society. People and institutions say they value a lot of things -- knowledge, God, country. But in a Capital-ism, power and comfort flow from people who have access to capital to whomever those people please.

If you're goal is to be in the top echelons of elitist society I guess that's where you've got to be. If your aim is be gainfully employed and make a good living then those schools aren't necessary for anything.

I have no problem with CEOs making lots of money. I have a problem with them making 100x more than their median employee; especially when their poorest employees aren't making a living wage.

But that's true for any job, not just CEOs. Plenty of people bust their ass and never make $250,000 like many FAANG employees. Should we cap the pay of FAANG employees to the lowest paid tech worker?

I have a problem with them making 100x more than their median employee

Why? What should the maximum multiple be? Should a CEO only make 20x the median employee? What if the company only has 10 employees? What if it has 200,000 employees, should it still be 20x?

I'm not sure I understand why a CEO's pay should be solely linked to the median wage of the employees. What's the logic behind it?

- so is CEO of Google

- CEO of Apple comes from working/lower-middle class family

- CEO of Johnson and Johnson (12th largest SP500 company) is an immigrant from Spain, coming from middle class family

etc etc etc

Middle class people aren’t the secretary to the prime minister.

https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/satya-nadela-microsoft...

> so is CEO of Google

“His father also had a manufacturing plant that produced electrical components”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai

You’re buying the propaganda.

That sounds quite normal, actually.

But the middle class (the petit bourgeoisie) is a small, economically elite class. It is in the middle between the working class that makes up the vast majority and the even narrower haut borgeoisie — the major capitalists whose relation to the economy centers on control of capital to which rented labor is applied.

Unfortunately, people sometimes confuse the middle class with the middle income segment of the working class, which is a very different thing. (And that confusion is often deliberately exploited.)

> That sounds quite normal, actually.

?!?!

> Unfortunately, people sometimes confuse the middle class with the middle income segment of the working class, which is a very different thing. (And that confusion is often deliberately exploited.)

Oh, I see. This doesn't seem particularly helpful. People don't "sometimes" confuse those two things. The de facto agreed upon meaning of "middle class" has been "middle income segment of the working class" for at least a century at this point.

And, in any case, serving on the Planning Commission seems much closer to "Ruling Class" than "Middle Class" unless you literally believe in the illuminati.

> The most unhappy people I see are the ones consuming hours of Reddit and Twitter every day.

I think you make a good distinction here. We always seems to lump "social media" into one big blob when talking about it but like you said I think there is some nuance here. I see Reddit/Twitter as a different kind of social media than Facebook/Instagram. On Instagram/FB it's all about the "real you", I have an account with my name on it and photos of me. Reddit (and to a lesser degree Twitter) on the other hand is all about being anonymous and interacting with strangers (as opposed to your friends) on the internet.

There's a time and place for both types of interactions but I feel like the "anonymous stranger internet" is what's really driving most of the negatives we see in social media.

Or god forbid Hacker News!

While Twenge wanted to talk about both things (and I'm somewhat suspicious of the certainty of her conclusions), I found it pretty thought-provoking to focus on the drop in in-person social interaction as the driver. Social media use can quite likely lead to lower in-person socialization (I do think it's likely causation, and in that direction). And there may be other social factors doing such too. Covid obviously. (note that rise in teen depression trend started well before covid though). Over-protectiveness (for teens) or general fear of risk of "the world"/focus on risk reduction. (They talked about this a bit).

To me it seems pretty clear (just my intuition/perception, not from actual social science) that our society is having a crisis of lack of meaningful relationships/community and lack of feeling of purpose in one's life, and this is leading to depression and anxiety. (As well as possible political disaster). What exactly is causing that lack of meaninful relationships and purpose, and what can be done, is harder. I think the internet is a (large) part of it, but so are other parts of the social/political/economic system.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

If it's spanning this many different trends, I think there ought to be some larger thing driving it, but I can't put my finger on what it is.

I mean, to me, the larger thing is probably "capitalism", in which increasing amounts of social life are turned into things that can produce profit for a business. Our particular capitalism built on racism doesn't help either, with it's legacy of "we don't want public amenities because we don't want to fund them for THOSE people" and "we're scared to go outside because a lot of people have a lot of reason to wish us harm." (that we built for cars instead of walkable cities or public transit actually has a LOT to do with racism)

But people don't love talking about this here. Or rather, they do and they don't. :)

In the general socciety, decline of social interaction has probably been a topic of discussion since Robert Putman's 2000 book "Bowling Alone". http://bowlingalone.com/

Overall, it’s difficult to have much hope for the future. We’re in a new cold war where collaboration decreases rapidly between the West and, I guess, East. That’s wildly different than 2008 when China and Russia appeared to warm up to the West and taking some more democratic stances.

What does excite me is the continued improvements in hardware and software. Let’s hope those things will continue improvements in entertainment, medicine, travel, and education.

The fact that social media has us all connected and capable of measuring relative to others?

Or the fact it's weaponized by an entire industry of "influencers" subsidized by actors just trying to maximize the consumption factor of economic activity?

Or the fact that the system is fundamentally governed by network effect induced power laws, leading to massive inequality, that can end up being a stressor on average?

Just trying to tease out the right thread here, is all.

Something that lets us all communicate isn't inherently bad. It's the end that it is applied to that is.

I’m not so sure this is the case. Seems like we are testing the limits of our social programming when exposed to networks _vastly_ beyond our capabilities historically, and we’re seeing the various ways that our social behaviors break down naturally. That there is a profit motive in encouraging and accelerating this breakdown might be orthogonal to the idea that it isn’t meant to exist at this scale in the first place.

Imagine growing up that way and then being sent off on your own. Of course your mental well-being will plummet. It's like being in a nice climate controlled house for 18 years and then being thrown out in the wilderness. When your expectation is to never have to deal with any discomfort.... well it's a shock.

As far as the social media part, I think many of these kids were raised on smart devices. They were receiving constant dopamine hits from a young age and no parenting on emotional regulation. If your brain is wired for an easy dopamine hit that doesn't require work, the real world is pretty harsh and depressing.

I have a couple of boys, 5 and 8. They have tablets and computers, and they love them. Some days we don't use them, some days they spend far too much time on them. Life goes on, we do what we can. I played an entire metric crap ton of video games at those ages, and I turned out okay, I think.

I keep hearing "screen time." That is the enemy. I'm not so sure it's just the screens. Of course it's not playing outside in a field, but you can't let them wander too far, somebody will call the cops.

A lot of the modern stuff (TV shows, movies, games) seems to overstimulate them way quicker compared to something like playing a day's worth of Super Mario World. Like it was designed to lure them in and enrage them or something.

I'm imagining social media is the same, but we're not there yet. I don't do a lot of social media myself, so hopefully they will see the example.

It’s being mocked over the environment. All they get is tough love as a generation dies off leaving behind the worst ecological mess any dying generation has left behind.

It’s being swindled by one socialized loss to enable private gain after another; sports stadiums, healthcare… etc

It’s teen women watching bodily autonomy taken from them by a bunch of leches.

And, the worst part, it’s the apathetic public following orders. Feckless society afflicted by learned helplessness; all the white collar workers who can’t provide anything real for themselves. Imagine being on the hook to coddle that?

This culture is a joke of self absorbed primates who ramble in high minded praise of their intelligence. War is peace and exploitation by aristocrats is freedom.

Wealth inequality has an increased a lot in the last four decades. I’d start there when looking for a source for mental health issues.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

Inside the US, this sounds wrong both anecdotally and from the data. I'd argue the cost of "living" has gone up quite substantially. Since 1980 rent has risen 140% and incomes 20%[0].

Anecdotally, in the 1970s it was entirely possible to live in an acceptable city or suburb on part-time work, and you could have your own apartment on minimum wage. You might not have nice things but I know many people who spent their 20s very comfortably like this not worrying about how to afford living. (having a family on this budget was not feasible, but that's another thing)

Conversely today I don't know anyone making less than less than 40k/yr who is not constantly stressing about food costs and how they'll make rent.

[0] https://www.realestatewitch.com/rent-to-income-ratio-2022/

Scientists also seem to be more anxiety prone than the general population. Also, it doesn't help if you take your work too seriously.

Instead of the victims or the culture, I'd rather look at the systemic issues that scientific institutions struggle with: debt, lack of social mobility, being underpaid and overworked, etc.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2022/08/31/22-tenu...

as one of the elephants in the room. It's particularly a problem for DEI because someone who diagnoses their problem as "I am a woman", "I am black", ... is missing the major factor that the people who seem to fit in just fine in academia just fine are working in the family business. That is, at best you can erase "black stigma" but the privilege you are looking for is not a "white privilege" shared by all whites but rather a much more specific privilege, and if we just got them to where the average white person is they'd still feel lost at sea.

But leaving academia is a process that takes some time. First cognitively as you give up on your dreams and decide to leave. Then as you search for a new job with no real-world experience and few or no connections.

In the mean time, the pipeline between grad school and professorship gets longer and fuller. Postdocs were once extremely prestigious positions, a sort of "finishing school" for the elite. Now they're standard, and most people need to do more than 1. In practice it's a holding pattern, giving PhDs something to do while they try to struggle to the top of the heap and find an assistant professorship.

And the actual experience of a postdoc! Leave all your friends and move to a new city. Work 60 hours a week for $45k a year. Have the rest of your career controlled by your PI, who you maybe met a few times before you decided to work for them, who has never had any kind of management training, and is under their own severe pressure to publish and bring in new grants. Compete against other brilliant, driven people, many of whom are abusing stimulants, and/or are immigrants with no safety net and willing to work 80+ hours.

How could this system NOT create a mental health crisis?

This is starting to happen in CS -- the level of technical competence remains fairly high, but the faculty ranks are swelling with "doesn't play well with others" types. Most of our PhD interns with serious ego/soft skill issues don't get return offers and end up in faculty positions as a result.

Continent.

On the other hand, jobs that won't impress anyone you meet tend to have fewer applicants and much better treatment, because they can't afford to drive people away.

There are many positive examples out there of ensuring student career success in a supportive lab environment while also producing good research. These need to be amplified as role models.

Enter competitive research academia. She felt constantly defeated by classmates and advisors who seemed to be working against her at every turn. One advisor, whom she trusted, moved to take a job with another university. She followed in the hope that she could shed the toxicity of the current working environment. Turns out that the new place was just as toxic.

She finished with a 4.0 through grad school but never defended the dissertation due to burnout, tired of the constant struggle for resources, attention, and just plain basic humanity. She now has a subservient role to PhDs she could run circles around intellectually.

I'm a current PhD student in a coveted top-3 program. We have one of the better stipends in the country, and I've been fully funded by fellowships. My advisor thinks highly of me and isn't abusive. I have a perfect GPA (not that that matters), some publications, and pretty broad technical skills in "hot" area(s). Nevertheless, graduation feels hopelessly out of reach, and I'm getting closer and closer to dropping out.

Academia is full of cronyism, perverse incentives, idea theft. Never mind work-life balance, there is no distinction whatsoever between work and life. There's no "out" if you're in a bad situation; you can't just change jobs like in the real world; your advisor is your "third parent". The incentive structures make it nearly impossible to meaningfully collaborate without some petty authorship conflict arising. It's isolating and seemingly designed to create unhappy, atomized, paranoid, jealous, mean-competitive people. At the end, there is ultimately no reward, materially speaking: all but the very tippy-top academic job tracks are no better.

Academia's clerical heritage is not its only monastic quality. I'm on the wrong side of my 20s and still living in a tiny, crappy apartment with a roommate. At this point I implicitly believe I will never get close to owning a home. That a family is out of the question. That the future is always worse than the present. I've gradually turned into a learned-helplessness "sorry I exist" person, without ever noticing.

Suddenly I see how pathetic that is. I'm ready to change back. I'm ready to be optimistic and ambitious and self-confident again. I'm ready to live a life of improvement, not stagnation. I'm ready to build something meaningful. Not to mention, my eyes are finally opening to how much I could be making in industry if only I hadn't been so proud/idealistic/willfully ignorant... And how much better that kind of salary can make your life.

For the right offer, I am so ready to break free (DMs open (just kidding (but actually though))).

Prescriptive formulas at the point of college entrance isn't the correct place to apply pressures. Mentoring, programs, resources, and subject public relations need to happen where there is great need and especially in areas with fewer resources.

yeah, its outdated, has been for a while

Every aspect of research work is awful: ridiculously little funding, a parasitic publishing system outsourcing all of its labor to us (unpaid), overloaded teaching, universities' ballooning middle management inventing new hoops every week, endless unpaid labor in the name of 'academic service', low salary, endless pressure.

Burn it all down.

Can't wait for AI to take over every field it can and push out the corrupting factor - humans

I wonder if researches from private companies feel the same woes. If so, its probably just the nature of, like others have mentioned, a deliverable / outcome based jobs. I'd imagine (and hope), that at the very least they're paid better and have more resources available to them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_bB3LBYG6E&list=RDQ_bB3LBYG...

"You halted the march of progress."

A lot of factors pushing for it:

1. the general madness and chaos of the Trump presidency ("When I wake up in the morning will I learn Trump has launched nukes at North Korea? Or vice versa?" etc etc, ad nauseum for 4 years)

2. COVID lockdowns and economic swings

3. apparent explosive rise in gun mass shootings -- "Will I or my loved ones be next?"

4. social media's toxic effect on peace of mind, in general

5. active efforts by various actors to spread lies, sow tensions and trigger violence (eg. stochastic terrorism)

6. carbon climate crisis... a biggie

Therefore I've been building a sci-fi post-apoc, educational game lately [SB: see below] which happens to take as its premises that:

7. humanity (or at least the US) fails to save democracy

8. humanity fails to act boldly enough or fast enough to save us from the worst of climate change's most dystopic effects

9. and therefore, due to all of above, there's a yet further MASSIVE rise in mental health disorders (all the way up to full blown de facto "insanity") -- eg. like many of the survivors you see in the Mad Max films

From a purely entertainment standpoint I loved watching films like Idiocracy and Mad Max Fury Road. As a person in the real world and a patriotic citizen I don't want to see us descend to that level of insanity, struggle and suffering. Our existing mental health systems are already inadequate today. If we start losing more doctors, nurses & therapists to anxiety/depression or over-work fatigue (speaking in broad terms), and also scientists, engineers, teachers, etc, then it will get MUCH worse.

----

[SB] - https://synystrongames.itch.io/slartboz

What is this “life” you speak of?

There's no winning this one.

I did the smart thing and quit. When you select for people who don't do the smart thing and want to be exploited in exchange for prestige they get exploited.

So maybe it is only partly about exploitation, but also about applying a social filter.

They're not the uber geniuses who flit to the top, but since the toxic incentives aren't as important to them due to their financial independence they get to focus on the work which ultimately pays dividends in their career.

I've also been told this is a prime driver for gender disparity in STEM academia: the women with the talent to succeed in a Ph. D. instead go earn their MD.

I have various hypothesis as to what other causes may be but they're not worth very much. The problem is too complex for one head to understand it. It's like trying to determine the cluster health from one server. IT CAN NOT BE DONE. I don't care what your credentials are, if you're not a god you can't do it.

I am willing to present this hypothesis in public: presenting the world in an idealized and false light, pretending that it should a safe space for everybody in which conflicts of interest and identities should not bother anybody is not helping. Generations are growing up expecting the world to embrace them, their identity, their ideas. This is causing fragility.

How exactly does this have "nothing to do with the article"?

[1]: https://www.wired.com/2012/06/famous-persecuted-scientists/

I hope that's not how you really understood it and you are just reducing the discussion to a childish level to try to get some points...

Calling it "culture" and laying some "blame" is a convenient "we're the worst off subset of victims; it's not us, it's them" perspective but it will neither solve the problem nor address the actual condition--science is not a utopian island that is separate from big business economics, university branding and wealth, nor from geopolitics.

Scientists have not figured out how to organize as well as any of those entities and will continue to be subjugated to their game and their system. When that is solved, the tools that abusers within the scientific community use against each other are more easily addressed.

Perhaps in the meantime we can pass some more laws that that make it seem like we care, but the existing regulations that make racism/ageism/sexism/abuse illegal are not currently effective. But to be clear: we don't care. We fought as hard as we could to win at that game and we raise our kids to try to win at that game. MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Cal, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin, <insert your personal alma mater for which you have pride in its research capabilities>: you wanted to get in; maybe you did; you will desire for your kids to get in; they probably won't. The patents and rights of science and research are in the hands of someone who is not doing the work.