“How do we stop the world’s smartest people from realising what we’re doing?”
“Let’s make them fight among themselves and call it a meritocracy; we’ll limit their funding and let them keep themselves busy with political infighting!”
This “have to play political games to get ahead” bullshit seems to apply almost everywhere.
Yeah, humans are social animals which create social systems everywhere they go. This shouldn’t shock anyone.
They do. However, the quality of a person’s work should be more important than their schmoozing skills. Not a shock, but definitely an annoyance.
This is how any new field of work or science starts out. Then, as money starts to be made, the field comes to the attention of the money- and power-hungry who slowly take it over and transform it into something they can control with politics and shenanigans. These people didn’t have the intelligence or passion or drive to create, but they know how to play people to get what they want. Unfortunately the good people too often let themselves be shmoozed by them and that’s their “in”
I know this term is overused, but it’s essentially enshittification. It didn’t start with the internet.
I’m genuinely confused how everyone is reacting to this. What good is research that no one cares to hear?
The research should speak for itself. Assuming the person judging it is competent, it shouldn’t need to be “sold”.
The people with the money don’t understand the science. If you can’t convince them that your science is worth investing in then why would they give you money? What’s really shocking is that a Nobel prize winner isn’t smart enough to understand that.
The idea is that those people shouldn’t be the ones with the money.
Then the academics should get better at taking it from them :)
At that point it should become a problem of educating, not politicking.
The thing is, “research” doesn’t speak, humans do. If a tree falls in the woods… and so on. Part of being a scientist is communicating what you’ve done, otherwise no one else will know. It’s a skill that has to be developed in some more than others, and it was a key part of my training as a scientist. I don’t really like that part as much, but I do it because it’s what makes my work have any impact.
Competence is judged by their ability to communicate the purpose and results. Lack of social skills also detracts from the audience who is willing to review it.
Valid to a degree, but there’s such a thing as placing too much value on the person presenting it rather than the content of it. It seems like too common an occurrence.
Not an academic, but this is spot on for how I’ve felt as a top performer getting nowhere. This realization helped me reorient my aspirations to what I find truly matters to me: my family and hobbies. I’m a solid individual contributor. Over the years, my work has saved us millions and been adopted across the country, which is reward enough. The speaking engagements and schmoozing, I’ll leave that to the extroverts in the boys club.
Same. It physically hurts to see talentless suck-ups play the bullshit game and climb the hierarchy, whereas you get punished and kept down for pointing out the bullshit. My best decision ever was to escape the hell that is the field of software development, and instead get into teaching. Now my reward for a job well done is seeing my students succeed and I love it so much.
I know that feeling all too well. Funny enough, I’d thought about going into software dev because I thought it’d let me work alone more comfortably. Along the way I found a way to learn dev but apply it to my job instead, making me pretty unique at what I do. It lets me innovate, do deep research, and work on my own while being pretty openly anti-social. Luckily I have a boss who sees the value in me.
I can’t tell you the number of once-interns and junior managers, stuck-in-a-rut folks, that I’ve quietly influenced to senior or higher positions. It really does feel incredible! I call it “leading from the back.” I’ve been wanting to write a book on it - the introverts and individual-contributors who quietly (and happily) influence without being seen.
I would read this book! Even a blog post, I’d 100% be interested
For something that I really hesitated to post, that was really encouraging to hear. Thanks!
+1 on the book idea. Sounds like a delightful read. I have a similar philosophy as well that’s worked for me. I’ve never once cared about getting credit or props, I make my boss/team look like geniuses. That naturally tends to reward you as well. Great individual contributors are actually pretty rare. Out of hundreds of engineers I’ve worked with closely, only a few were brilliant in the way you described.
If you’re looking for related reading, perhaps for inspiration, there’s a great book called
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain.
I highly recommend it.
I work as an engineer for a huge financial company, so I relate. I was a scrappy upstart who worked himself through the lowest tiers of my industry towards the top. I’m also neurodivergent.
I can speak on for days about how bosses don’t care who’s doing the work as long as it gets done.
As a top performer, you’re likely to feel that people should perform at the standards you set, and your natural first instinct is probably to try to train and educate your coworkers. You soon realize that they either don’t give a shit or they’re offended that you’re giving them advice. No problem, we live in a hierarchical society, so you tell your boss about the problems you face, they’ll have your back, right? Wrong. You’re rocking the boat, and the boss’ job is to keep the boat afloat.
Now, instead of rocking the boat, you start to wonder if you there’s a way you can change the current of the water so the boat goes in the proper direction. That’s where wisdom and skill meet. There’s an incredible amount of depth involved in influencing people and change. I wish it wasn’t the way of the world, but it is. Being brilliant is only half the battle.
This is the fucking world. Like it or not it’s about putting yourself out there and networking. Doesn’t matter how bright you are. I wish it wasn’t but it is.
I’m trying to imagine a job where being a disagreeable antisocial recluse is an advantage and I’m coming up blank.
That is hardly the idea the author is trying to give…
IT Business Analyst
IT is super hierarchical and requires immense political skills to get anything done.
Owner of Twitter?
Read some Foucault for an explanation, that’s just being human. You don’t stop being human just because you follow scientific ideals. All human endeavors will follow human dynamics.
Miss me with that thought terminating cliche.
No. Science is the only human effort that specifically defines what human is. If we allow that “sure being human is going to mess up science” then we have failed before we even started.
I’m really surprised, although this is becoming kind of common so perhaps I shouldn’t be, to see all the comments saying effectively “yeah, so?”
Science doesn’t define what humans are. Humans are, then science plays catch up to try and define what that even means. Science is a human endeavor, a framework of thought, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it cannot exist without humans thinking, talking about it and doing it.
So if I ask you to define what a human is, you’re not going to draw at all from any previous scientific studies?
I doubt it. Not to get too ontological, just saying science (biology, psychology, anthropology) very much do define what human is.
Yet another flawed system run by humans. Humans always ruining nice things.
The system was literally invented by humans and follows our shitty nature perfectly.
This world is very difficult for people like me who are a little on the spectrum, since moving and shaking is what gets you places
I’ve got bad news about…pretty much every career path.
Sabine Hossenfelder has a video on this problem.
I think this is a very interesting take, but I am curious about how the career in youtube is better than the academia as she describes it.
Obviously, the discrimination against female and writing without proper acknowledgement is absolutely unacceptable, but I have never heard about anything like this in my field.
However, I feel like youtube is likely a more competitive landscape than grant writing. I think it is very likely the administrative overhead for youtuber is more than 15%, and youtuber needs to get the interest of people completely ignorant of the subject, not just experts, plus battling the unpredictbility of youtube algorithm.
Of course, I am not trying to downplay the problem she mentioned, but I am just wondering how youtube is a better alternative career, considering her goal to do “serious and innovative science”.
I was thinking of this video as soon as I saw the post. She’s really an interesting person.
And this is actually a good thing that it’s taught at Penn, as it doesn’t lie to you and say, “just get high grades and you’ll be the best in the world!”
Would have been nice if my university taught us that
Yes but didn’t we all know that at some point before choosing that career? How do you get roughly 22 years into it - a PhD - and not know that academia is essentially a political rodeo and your research is going to be affected heavily by it? Didn’t anyone whisper it to you confidentially in the back of some elective?
It most definitely shouldn’t be, it’s clearly poisonous to the idea of science, but it wasn’t like a secret either. Like, it’s “not ok” that that’s the case, it’s not something we should wave away as “just human things” - it should be addressed, it should be fixed. But it wasn’t unknown.
There is no alternative if you actually want to do science and don’t have millions of dollars to buy labs and materials and instruments. Science gets done in spite of everything she is describing.
Fair, but how does someone take on that career and not know that?
I think it’s the degree of bullshit that increases gradually. To speak from experience, when you are a grad student you get a feeling like there’s corruption but overall your project seems like it’s important and making a real contribution (hopefully). You also don’t have to worry about where the money is coming from. Sometimes the grant as a whole is total bullshit but there is enough discretionary spending included that great science comes out of it. But you don’t realize this until you’re writing grants, and by then you’re maybe too deep in the game to pull out. Essentially, you end up becoming a manager once you get tenure. There is no epiphany; it’s more like a slow creep.
Okay. I dunno, for me it was expressly stated by many people.
Depends on the program you are in. The view from being a doctoral student to being a postdoc to being research/lecturing staff is very different. Not all advisors expose their students to the realities of higher levels of academia. And when a woman or minority is being mentored by a white man, they may not be aware of biases that can affect the student’s later career.
I mean, maybe I had a different view, but that was known to myself and the people I was in school with as early as highschool. As a part of the landscape, like, yes you can pursue a career in academia but. Publish or perish, etc.
It’s definitely unknown to the vast majority of the tens of thousands of college freshmen who sign up to be STEM majors. Usually by the time they figure it out it’s already far too late to change their majors without rearranging their entire lives
Well, hopefully this will help change things then. It’s definitely not new.
Sorry, unless you start your own sovereign country, you have to participate in society. Not everyone likes promoting themselves, disagreeing diplomatically, etc. Still, we play the game, even though I wish we didn’t all have to…
That is true it is a big part of society and how to get along, and you would think that because this is one of the foundations of this society it would be a bigger part of someone’s education. This shouldn’t be something people should have to figure out on their own in order to feed themselves and their family
One semester of Schmooze 101 could go along way in helping an awkward yet brilliant scientist get the funding they need.
Well there are two alternatives that let you not do it. We either die of starvation alone and isolated, never cooperating with anyone. Or we club and bomb each other away in endless fight and war over resources. I like the being diplomatic, political and deliberative way much better than either of these, even if it can seem a bit hypocritical and tiring some times.
This is why socialism is the answer.
Imagine funding because science instead of margins for corporate investors. That’s how Cuba made 12 COVID vaccines. And gave them away for free to the entire population and the global south as well. So yeah, downvote away lol.
I SE>
that’s how it workes everywhere
