Exchange tips, if any real scientists are on here. Especially regarding how long you should work per day. I find that after 4 hours of maximally focused work, I'm nuked for the rest of the day.

>>16700903 (OP)
first and foremost find a good advisor

>>16700905
Effortposting, in the hopes that people that actually do science are here.

What is a 'good advisor'? If you work closely enough with anyone you end up finding more than enough fault in them.
I have a senior advisor that I discuss projects with once every 2 months, and a more junior for weekly/biweekly supervision. I don't have 'problems' with them outside the typical stuff you'd expect in academia: the late career supervisor is infrequently available, the early career one cares about his career and not mine. But I think these things could be expected and are part of the game.
They're more than happy to open doors for me if I produce good output, and they're happy with letting me explore different avenues/projects if they're well thought-out. No funding problems.

I just wish I had someone that I really looked up to as a mentor and and a friend. I think I'm quite similar personality-wise to my senior advisor, but it comes down to producing Great Work if I want preferential treatment. Which is kind of how I've approached my whole life by this point: excel first, and then people automatically like me.

I just really, really really wanna do well, and produce good work that people care about.

>>16700917
>I just wish I had someone that I really looked up to as a mentor and and a friend
My two cents here as a first-gen college grad. This is how I expected my advisor to be. Not exactly as a friend, they’re my boss after all. But I certainly expected a sense of connection, that “hey I finally met a person who’s interested in the same flavor of autism as I am”. I picked my grad school and my advisor purely on that motivation. Their research interests aligned with mine and everything looked magical when I got enrolled.

Past forward 2-3 years and that idealistic dream is shattered. My advisor turned out to be very distant and disinterested. Fair( they were a full professor by that point. But at least you’d expect them to understand what you’re doing, right? Wrong, my advisor would just state at me blankly when I gave them status reports. The whole experience left me feeling like a schizophrenic talking to myself. But a schizophrenic tied to what’s essentially a middle manager who sits above you and derives megalomaniac pleasure from that. I drove me nuts and I quit.

Maybe other advisors are different, but many of my PhD friends have reported similar experiences. For 90% of people pursuing a PhD this isn’t the problem because they don’t care about what they study and just want a shiny paper to brag about. I’m the opposite. My autism could not handle that theatre of vanity.

Thanks for reading my blogpost.

>>16700917
sounds like you have no problem with your current group. if you want a more personal approach from an advisor you're going to have to find one who is just starting up their lab so you can spend plenty of 1:1 time with them while they're physically involved in the lab setting things up

>I just really, really really wanna do well, and produce good work that people care about.
blackpill: very few people, if any, will ever give a shit about your work. your thesis will be read by your advisor (maybe) and skimmed through by most of your committee. if the chapters are already published they may not even look through it beyond looking at what sections are present

>>16700917
>produce good work
The best possible work would be the kind that disproves widely held beliefs of the field.
>work that people care about
Work people care about is the kind that affirms their widely held beliefs.

Which way, Academic Hue'd-Man?

You don't. If you're lucky, you'll get some results then quickly write your thesis then gtfo the program asap. I've seen retards trying to do more and more and it takes more than 7 years just to finish it.

>>16700929
>Wrong, my advisor would just state at me blankly when I gave them status reports.
I don't expect my senior supervisor to understand all the details. I understand that his role in the lab is to a) get money for me to do research, b) maintain international connections for himself and everyone else, c) oversee the general trend of what I'm doing and maintain cohesion in the lab.

What makes me sad is that I find my early career supervisor, that I have more frequent contact with, mostly incompetent. He's well respected in the country but not internationally (maybe acceptable for his career stage), and he gives me enough freedom without having me go off the rails. But still, it doesn't feel like I can count on him or trust him for anything, and if it comes down to it, his career comes first, and if I don't like it, I can go fuck myself. Not very reassuring.

>>16700931
The person I spend 1:1 time with is not exactly a role model, see also my response to the anon above.

>very few people, if any, will ever give a shit about your work
I'm working on the hottest topics in my field, and people do give a shit. What I do also has applications for many commercial applications. I am quite scared of fucking it up.

>>16700933
I keep hearing this meme, but I don't see it in practice. Yeah, maybe I produce data that seems to at least partially disagree with where the field is going. Complete field-wide shifts seem however to come from an accumulation of papers produced from many labs over a period of time, up to the point that a course correction seems like a no-brainer.

>>16700941
I'm in Europe. Four years, decent salary.

>>16700947
>He's well respected in the country but not internationally
don't worry, no one takes indians seriously

>>16700956
Everyone I work with, including me, is so White they could be in a Nazi propaganda poster, you mongoloid.

>>16700964
>Everyone I work with, including me, is so White they could be in a Nazi propaganda poster, you mongoloid.

>>16700947
>I don't expect my senior supervisor to understand all the details.
I did theory for my PhD, so it's quite a different vibe. I didn't expect them to understand literally every minute detail, but at the very least provide something thought provoking. Never happened.
>I understand that his role in the lab is to a) get money for me to do research, b) maintain international connections for himself and everyone else, c) oversee the general trend of what I'm doing and maintain cohesion in the lab.
I get that too, but then the name "advisor" is an obvious misnomer. Even "principal investigator" is garbage because they don't investigate shit themselves. I would have appreciated the honest "research patron" much more. Also, I didn't get any funding outside summer and had to TA to cover my tuition. As for connections, it took my advisor two whole years to finally introduce me to the group and then literally the next week they were all off to a conference without me. Felt like a big giant "fuck you" in my direction.

>>16700954
No you don't have decent salary in Europe for any job. How do you claim you have decent salary for PhD?

>>16701002
>Americans when you tell them you can live just fine without a loaned Ford F150 and a mortgaged McMansion.

>>16700917
>good advisor
Best advice I got is don't get sucked in by a charlatan. You will hopefully meet and talk with some potential supervisors and some of them might talk a big game but these people are often the most full of shit. Just stick with your gut, if they give you a weird vibe they are probably 10 times worse once you get to know them. Case and point, I met with a potential advisor just starting out and looking for students. Professor had all the accolades, PhD from some big shot, postdoc with some other bigshot etc. Talked way too confidently and above me, really felt like kind of a robot shit talker. Flash forward a decade and I have more papers published than this prof in the same time period and I am nothing special myself. I also witnessed all the grad students drop/flee from that lab and what a disaster it was for all involved.

>>16700903 (OP)
real scientists....you're on the wrong board.

>>16701125
This posts resonates with me (I'm >>16700929) btw. Exactly the kind of attitude my advisor had. Would bitch to me about not publishing anything in 3 years, but when I approached them twice with a ready-to-publish manuscripts, they threw a bucket of shit my way and told me no journal would accept it. Approached a postdoc later and he was excited to coauthor the paper with me. I couldn't find a replacement advisor by that point and left without defending.

>>16700917
>What is a 'good advisor'?
It's not a question with a simple answer, different people will have different takes on it. Me, personally, I'd say finding a good institution and a good advisor is mostly a matter of "fit". You'll hear that term thrown around a lot and it mostly just means finding an institution and an advisor who complements the things that make you a good student and potential researcher while helping to balance and buff out your flaws and faults.

>>16701173
where is the right board?

>>16702574
>>>/gif/

>>16702574
/fit/ and /pol/

>>16700903 (OP)
>How to be an excellent PhD student?
get lucky

>>16700903 (OP)
>how long you should work per day
as much as you can without burning out. i find the desire to do work comes in waves. when motivation is low, it is important to stay disciplined. still 'clock-in' to meet your minimum quota. 4 hours a day is fine. tbqh you can get away with less. when motivation is high, lean into it. hours can pass in what seems like minutes. just remember to take care of your body and eat and stuff during these times. i have found learning to surf this schizophrenic wave.

>I'm nuked for the rest of the day.
take care of bullshit / low intensity stuff once your brain is depleted for the day. i was a fuckin lab monkey in grad school so for me this is just doing all the tedious hands on shit i needed to do to keep research progressing. as my career has progressed it is now more bureaucratic tasks that need doing to keep the bills paid.

>>16700917
>They're more than happy to open doors for me if I produce good output, and they're happy with letting me explore different avenues/projects if they're well thought-out. No funding problems.
it sounds like you are already in a very good situation. i would have killed to have been in this situation.

>I just wish I had someone that I really looked up to as a mentor and and a friend.
have you tried befriending more senior graduate students in your lab?

>>16700947
>I keep hearing this meme, but I don't see it in practice.
then your aren't in the know or not looking hard enough. do not mistake the literature for the field. the map is not the territory.

>>16700903 (OP)
>how long you should work per day
find natural stopping points and don't do too many things at once
don't work too hard or long, remember that it's a marathon, not a sprint.

>>16700929
Anon, you discovered the harsh truth of autism. The autist is a demon wearing human skin, he can not empathize or be interested in what others have to say. If you had gone on to have students of your own, you'd have given them the same blank stare while you waited impatiently for them to shut up. All because they aren't aligning with your exact fixation 100%.

>>16700903 (OP)
High quality sleep, proper nutrition, and regular moderate intensity cardiovascular exercise.
Unironically.

So Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, Thomas Edison, Jane Goodall, Mary Anning, Benjamin Franklin, William and Caroline Herschel are not "real scientists" because they were self-taught rather than formally trained, yet this is "real science" because someone signed off on it?

That is not true according to the actual history of science. Pure vanity and egoism. Substance is what matters most, not labels. Some are more concerned with their pride than pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.

This is especially true in regards to trends in science. Go and do a database search for papers recently published on the subject of artificial intelligence and you will find a great deal of nonsense that does not even touch the mathematical fundamentals and simply exists to justify a credential or a job.

>>16700956

This man is Indian and massively advanced the field of mathematics. He also did a great deal of his work without formal accreditation.

You will find no shortage of students and researchers from India and China if you study hard science. Similarly, in the social sciences, you will find many charlatans writing hot air to justify their jobs and credentials.

This is not always the case, but it is a general trend. There are many creative ways to bluff your way into academia.

>>16703297
>So Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, Thomas Edison, Jane Goodall, Mary Anning, Benjamin Franklin, William and Caroline Herschel are not "real scientists" because they were self-taught rather than formally trained
Yes, and even much of /sci/ believes this. The cry of our era is "you can't learn anything without church approval, and if you think you did then you learned it wrong".

>>16703297
>So Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, Thomas Edison, Jane Goodall, Mary Anning, Benjamin Franklin, William and Caroline Herschel are not "real scientists" because they were self-taught rather than formally trained
notice that all of these are from over 130 years ago.

>yet this is "real science" because someone signed off on it?
No, the liberal arts are not a science.

>>16703304

It does not help that there are many genuine crackpots who have a bone to pick with academia.

To answer OP's question. I spend 11 hours yesterday studying algorithms for professional reasons. 4 hours is nothing if you are highly motivated. The Pomodoro Technique helps me a lot, another programmer taught me about it.

My motivation, speaking anonymously, is to help a family that is facing life and death in Gaza at the hands of zionist genocide. They pray for my success and I can't let them down. Imagine that if you do not study hard enough then someone dies and you could have prevented it by studying harder and you will get an idea of my state of mind.

>>16703310

There are contemporary examples like John L. Janning, but of course it takes time for the significance of contemporary discoveries to be framed in historical context. Social sciences and liberal arts are not synonymous. Economics is a social science that involves the application of high level math.

>>16703313
>Economics is a social science that involves the application of high level math.
lol
lmao
Regardless, this is not a social science wprk, which is the point.

>>16703313
>1961
>contemporary
that was nearly a lifetime ago?

Oh look it's the smelly bitch again. I remember this.

I believe the argument was that people should be allowed to study whatever they want because there may be tertiary findings / connections that help develop other studies such that there is an increase in social utility.

*farts*
well here's some social utility for ya

>>16700903 (OP)
I am a Meteorologist so not sure if that is under your definition of a "real scientist", but frankly its not that hard. It was more carefree than the part time job I had during my undergrad.
Everyone saying good advisor is right - I have met people who I am glad I did not have.
For time management, I have always been pretty sporadic, I will go some days being lazy and some days where I am locked in for 12 hours straight. It is what is.
The defence is the only scary part - but frankly your first paper is probably going to be dogshit regardless.

>>16700903 (OP)
If I had it to do over again ...
I would throw myself into the research of the faculty member with whom I'd most likely get published the soonest.
Inherent in this is that it would serve to get my disseration over and done with while teaching my how to publish on my own.
I put way too much emphasis on my dissertation subject rather than how to successfully complete research.

>>16700903 (OP)
t. have my defense in two weeks.

don't do a PhD if you are not sure you want to be in academia. Most industries don't need PhDs, it's actually a drawback in a lot of cases (unless it's industry-funded).

4 hours is unironically rookie numbers. Maybe you can pull it off in social sciences. For STEM, if you are not in some bullshit provincial diploma mill, 8 hours should be the bare minimum. If you can't work that hard, find a way to do it (as someone said, nutrition, exercise, something). If you are physically/mentally fine, then it's a motivation issue, so just don't do the PhD.

Publishing is all that matters, really. You will soon face the truth that papers are the main metric for postdocs, funding, career etc. So, work with people who are focused on getting papers out. If your supervisor has a good recent track record, that's a great sign. By the way, they most likely won't be your friend/mentor, so don't be let down when they don't give a shit about you, that's actually 9 out of 10 cases.

Networking also matters a lot, jump on every conference/seminar/meeting opportunity. Pretend you're retarded. Ask questions.

Finally, if after 2 years you feel like you're on the wrong track - the people suck, there are no papers in sight, you don't have the funding needed - it's time to quit or fundamentally switch to something else.

>>16700903 (OP)
>How to be an excellent PhD student?
Make it your priority to get a paper published as soon as possible, whatever it takes.

>>16703596
The number of hours is exactly why I made the thread in the first place.
Can you maximally concentrate for 8 hours/day on high stakes tasks? Lunch, answering emails, doing low stakes work, preparing presentations, chatting with colleagues or sitting in meetings doesn't count. I'm talking about the actual 'meat' of the work, where if you fuck something up, you're in trouble.

I've tried to do this with no results. I don't know if it's because of me being a mental midget, or if this can be expected. After 4 hours of maximal concentration, it's like I was in a 4-hour exam. I can still do lighter, low stakes work for the rest of the day, but my brain is fried when it comes to doing the high stakes stuff.

Should I just git gud?

>>16703580
>>16703611
Output speed is important, I'm trying to finish as fast as possible. It's not going as fast as I hoped when I started, but it's still looking respectable.

You get lucky basically. Try training luck by riding a bicycle dangerously and doing low level gambling.

>>16703628
I don't know why 8 hours of work is incomprehensible to you. Like, have you ever held a job? For example, if you work in a warehouse, you do pretty much non-stop physical activity for around 8 hours a day (depends on the employer, of course). Construction sites - even more hours. Same with PhD, it's just mental instead of physical work, mostly. Sure, you become less focused throughout the day, but 8 hours should be doable. Maybe it's easier to imagine for me, because I did my PhD in biochemstry, so for around 3 years I would work for 6-10, sometimes 12 hours a day with a lunchbreak in the middle. Check your emails in the morning and then you're off to the lab, running samples, doing statistics, writing protocols, performing technical maintenance.

I think in your case it's either lack of experience or some biological issue. Find ways to optimize your performance. Use stimulants (at least, the legal ones) - I drink several cups of nuclear grade tea a day. There was a period where I had relatively shitty performance, but it was because I stopped working out for a while. Your brain won't be at peak performance just because you want it.

>>16700903 (OP)
>I find that after 4 hours of maximally focused work, I'm nuked for the rest of the day.
Most people can do intense work EITHER in the morning OR the afternoon but very rarely both.
So figure out which one matches you, make sure you reserve that timeslot to your most demanding stuff, and use the other period for generic gunk such as emails.

>>16703712
>>16703726
>inside you are two wolves

>>16703712
>compares designing critical experiments / interpreting complex analyses and presenting them in a convincing way to moving boxes in a warehouse like some sort of drone
I can move boxes 8 hours a day. I also can work 12h a day if I have to. But if I'm doing 12h of high-stakes tasks, I cannot maintain that pace for more than a couple weeks. There's no way your error rate on hour 11 is as low as on hour 1. You can also not convince me you can do high quality scientific writing for 12h in a row.
Am I crazy or is this just a skill issue on my part?

>>16703726
Yeah, that's how I do it, but I feel like people like >>16703712 believe more can be done. I don't know what's objectively correct, and if doing more concentrated work isn't just a skill issue.

I've also heard stories from Europeans going to American labs of Americans claiming to work 12h/day+, but most of these hours are quite inefficient. Not sure who is right. Which is why I made the thread.

>>16703628
>The number of hours is exactly why I made the thread in the first place.
The truth is that you you still work while you don't work. Don't fall into the trap of working excessive hours. It will just make you feel worse, make you retarded and overall ruin a time that should be pretty fun.
Take it easy. Think things through. Read a lot. Learn how to write.
There is often more value in doing one experiment than 10. If you force youself to work as little as possible (and you're skilled), you can make things come together, just as well, if not better than someone working excessively hard.
If you are serious about science, then your workday doesn't start when you sit down at your desk and it doesn't end when you get up. Doing research is a lifestyle, something that obsessively consumes your mind at all waking hours. You don't need to work hard, you just need to think, so when you do actually do the work, you are doing something that is good and produces tangible results.
Only focus on one major task every day, don't pile things up, just complete one simple goal per day.
Remember that if something is difficult, there is something you likely don't know or there are resources you don't have. Everything you do should be easy.
It's a marathon, not a sprint.


>Can you maximally concentrate for 8 hours/day on high stakes tasks?
I effectively worked for like 2-3 hours a day. The rest was slacking off, sitting around thinking and discussing the science with people.
I have multiple high impact papers to show for my efforts (or lack thereof)

>>16703712
>have you ever held a job?
Have you? Most high intensity cognitive workers do like 2 to 4 hours of work a day and spend the rest passing time.

>>16703744
>I've also heard stories from Europeans going to American labs of Americans claiming to work 12h/day+, but most of these hours are quite inefficient.
oh yeah, this is 100% true. Americans "work" crazy hours, but in reality they spend a roughly similar amount of time on task. They'll leave in the middle of the day (while reporting their hours) to do laundry or do other random shit. You know all these "adult daycare" type "day in the life of X worker" videos? It really is somewhat like that, even at MIT. It's not that there aren't grueling long days or there isn't any hard work happening, but I wouldn't say it's any worse than in Europe? People are more at the office, that's true, but they don't work any more.

>>16703744
>people like >>16703712
If you do a biochem PHD most of your "work" is essentially the science equivalent of stacking boxes in a warehouse.

>>16702995
>i find the desire to do work comes in waves.
This. My last few years were characterized by me barely being in the lab for days or weeks on end interspersed by ~3-4 week blocks where I'd be in the lab for 12+ hour shifts 7 days a week, same with writing the diss.

>>16703712
>off to the lab, running samples, doing statistics, writing protocols, performing technical maintenance.
lab monkey work is different from intellectual work

>>16700903 (OP)
Imagine the smelle

>>16704045
This is a woman who convinced her school to allow her at least 3 years straight of contemplating the aroma.
If we weren't living in clownworld I'd say she's one of us, and her PhD is a world-class shitpost.

>>16703744
okay, now I'm curious, what are these mystical 'high-stakes tasks' you are talking about?

>>16703762
"most" doesn't mean good, it means "average". OP is asking tips for being a good PhD student.

>>16703795
>>16703887
alright wiseguys, what is "real scientific work"? applying for grants?

>>16704056
>>what are these mystical 'high-stakes tasks'
>Planning complex experiments with expensive reagents you will have to order
>Writing protocols for multi-month experiments
>Finalising documentation for an ethical board for clinical studies
>Interpreting results of important experiments and presenting them to your supervisor, to decide the best course of action
>For projects that require iterative experimentation, effectively troubleshooting what went wrong the last time and deciding what you want to change when you rerun the experiment
>Submitting revisions for important articles

From the things you previously mentioned (running samples, doing statistics, writing protocols, performing technical maintenance), only writing protocols can be high stakes for expensive/long-term experiments. Doing statistics when you have a predefined plan is pretty mindless (unless you're doing heavy epidemiology or something), running samples should be easy if it's not the first time you're doing it. And technical maintenance doesn't even count as work.

Note, I'm not trying to compete on "who has the most complex PhD" or "who does the realest most important work". I'm trying to see if the 12/h day approach is realistic for a high achiever of if it's a meme.

>>16704056
>what is "real scientific work"?
What does your boss do while you're busy being a lab monkey?

>>16700903 (OP)
i like this thread
maybe there should be a phd general on sci
make that whore the mascot

>>16704061
ok, so we are essentially talking about the same tasks. I don't understand why are you disparaging my example. Absolutely every one of the points I mentioned could be 'high stakes' according to your definition. And now you went up in 'trying to see' from 4 hours of 'high-stakes tasks' to 12 hours per day. What are you trying to achieve here? What do you want to see?
>>16704069
kek

>>16704071
if you ever call anything a general, it gets filled with schizos. if you make any recurring thread that's not a general, it gets filled with schizos. if you make a thread, it gets filled with schizos.
hmmm. i may be noticing a pattern here...

>>16704072
> Absolutely every one of the points I mentioned could be 'high stakes' according to your definition.
No, it can't, and I already explained why for each one. Doing statistics or instrument maintenance does not have the same cognitive load as making sensitive decisions for the protocol of an expensive study that will take 6 months. Calibrating pipettes, making simple solutions for everyone to use or working out the planning for instrument use is not as taxing as figuring out how your results fit in with the hypothesis of your paper and the broader literature, and in what narrative this should be presented to your supervisor so he doesn't misunderstand something and send you to chase bigfoot.

What I'm trying to get at is this. There seem to be two schools of thought when it comes to demanding intellectual work. One is yours, that says that it's perfectly reasonable to do that for 10h/day and it's just a skill issue if you work less. You are not the only person I've heard say this. I don't want to disparage you, unironically.

The other one, which this anon seems to support (>>16703726, >>16703762), and which I also see in my own life, is that if you maximally focus for +-4h, that's essentially all the high quality output you can get in that day. You can still answer emails, sit in meetings, calibrate instruments, read papers or whatever for the next 4-6h, but that is grunt mindless work. The chance you produce anything of value after the first highly focused 4h becomes exponentially lower, and eventually approaches zero, especially if you try to do it for days/weeks on end. Let alone years.

So which one is it?

>>16704095
>So which one is it?
it is the latter and people who claim the former are either overvaluing the demands of their work or the quality of their output

>>16704079
/mg/ has very few schizos if any and I’d say it’s the only thread on /sci/ where there are always people who know their shit and can hold actual discussions

>>16700905
tim hunt my advisor

>>16700903 (OP)
>>16700917

The reputation of your PI matters a lot. Once the PI has a good profile, it's trivial to be taken seriously but if your PI is unknown your research will be invisible.
So a good reputation trumps everything else. If your PI is an asshole dictator but has a high profile lab, that's still better than if they are a nice kind person but has zero profile.

Besides that, the PI himself needs to be a good balanced person because being a PI is about juggling different priorities and you don't want some autistic fuck that goes 0% on one priority and 100% on another priority.
Priorities include among other things:
>allowing you the freedom to do your own research and build your own skills
>doing good work
>focusing on novel but also relevant research domains
>publishing regularly and other forms of maintaining a profile, like posters and conferences
>building academic and industry connections
>working towards your post-doc life


My first PI was absolutely awful. He was this inexperienced autistic midwit who considered himself the next Feynman. He had this one plan in mind and reduced me to his labrat without any say on the matter. And no he did not have some brilliant plan. His whole pursuit was borne out of his lack of understanding of the limits of the technology we were working with.

I got something she can smell

>>16700903 (OP)
4 hours of good work is doing well, but you have to be ruthless with how you divide your attention. If it doesn't clearly benefit your PhD it's not worth spending time on

>>16700917
>produce good work that people care about
Produce work that gets you your PhD, if people care about it that's a plus but not actually necessary. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good

>>16700941
So anybody with a Ph.D that took them 7-8 years or more is a shitter?

>>16705237
yes

>>16705237
In any serious project you need to manage scope. If you take 7 years to produce a Ph.D you're guilty of poor management or, even worse, you believe a Ph.D is your ultimate work. It's not. It's your very first baby retard paper as a real academic.

>>16703303
>This man is Indian and massively advanced the field of mathematics
He did nothing anyone ever uses. His formulas are not understood and hence useless, to date

>>16705450
>It's your very first baby retard paper as a real academic.
How come top schools require you to publish in undergrad if you even want a chance at being admitted as a PhD student? Sounds like circular reasoning.
>you totally need to publish papers before we let you into a program designed to teach you how to publish papers. Oh, and you need to publish papers during that program even though your thesis will be your first publication.

>>16705566
The way you get an authorship in a substantial publication while still in undergrad is nepotism. This way schools additionally filter for groomed nepobabies with maxed out connections, which is the most desirable trait of all.

>>16705595
>which is the most desirable trait of all
I get that from the business-oriented perspective, but from the science perspective it’s self-destructive. You’re creating an echo chamber which is closed off to outsiders. More reminiscent of the Catholic church than a bona fide scientific community.

>>16705636
It's neither business-oriented nor science-oriented. It's responsibility avoidance.

>Lab head picks up a student based on his apparent talent.
Student does good = lab head gets credit, lab head did good
Student does bad = lab head is to blame, he trusted his own judgement and fucked up, lab head did bad, his authority takes a hit.

>Lab head picks up a student based on his metrics and connections.
Student does good = lab head still gets credit, lab head did good.
Student does bad = the publication that admitted the student's authorship is to blame, the big connected guy who recommended the student did is to blame, the institutions the tested the student's metrics are to blame. Lab head trusted him as he is instructed to do and they failed him, lab head did no wrong, he did good but other parts of the system failed him. He's in the clear.

>>16705636
It's neither business-oriented nor science-oriented. It's responsibility avoidance.

>Lab head picks up a student based on his apparent talent.
Student does good = lab head gets credit, lab head did good
Student does bad = lab head is to blame, he trusted his own judgement and fucked up, lab head did bad, his authority takes a hit.

>Lab head picks up a student based on his metrics and connections.
Student does good = lab head still gets credit, lab head did good.
Student does bad = the publication that admitted the student's authorship is to blame, the big connected guy who recommended the student is to blame, the institutions the tested the student's metrics are to blame. Lab head trusted them as he is instructed to do and they failed him, lab head did no wrong, he did good. He's in the clear.

Pushing responsibility sideways is basically always a win-win strategy and as such is vital for building an advanced academic career. You still get some fuck ups, but they roll off you with no consequence, and even mediocrity floats you up gradually with time. Otherwise you might be a turbo-genius with a school of Nobel-worthy talented students, but just a handful of mistakes will ruin your reputation with the higher ups and will be exaggerated and leveraged by your competitors, since you are the only one to blame for them.

It's not a game of who's ahead by being the best, it's a game of who's left after all the black marks were distributed.

>>16705641
>It's not a game of who's ahead by being the best, it's a game of who's left after all the black marks were distributed.
I get that too, but what is the result of all this? I don’t wanna go Sabine mode, but this is not conducive to innovation or scientific progress.

>>16705644
>I get that too, but what is the result of all this?
It is what it is.

On one hand, the current financial interests are not particularly interested in substantial innovation. They're good and mostly pay for maintaining an image of scientific development while only seeking iterative refinement and absence of fallout coming from really poor results. So a 1000 safe "eh" projects are inherently better for them than even 990 substantial successes and 10 massive failures, much less the realistic innovative picture of 990 massive failures and 10 substantial successes.

This is grey and demoralizing and sad, but on the other hand history teaches us that when financial interests are after legitimate innovation, they tend to get more involved, purge the personnel from people they don't like, involve glowies even if the field has absolutely no connection to national security, and straight up persecute people who take the funding and then fail to deliver results - and most attempts will fail, that's how innovation works. If they want results they'll use any measure they can to accelerate them. Meanwhile personnel safety goes out the door and internal academic relations get a hundred times more adversarial and cut-throat. Now we're biting our thumbs at the guys on the other floor, in those conditions putting people to work pn actively sabotaging them might become imperative to survival.

So I'm not sure I'm saddened by not living in interesting times, research-wise. There are no golden ages.

>>16705644
>>16705644
>I get that too, but what is the result of all this?
It is what it is.

On one hand, the current financial interests are not particularly interested in substantial innovation. They're good and mostly pay for maintaining an image of scientific development while only seeking iterative refinement and absence of fallout coming from really poor results. So a 1000 safe "eh" projects are inherently better for them than even 990 substantial successes and 10 massive failures, much less the realistic innovative picture of 990 massive failures and 10 substantial successes.

This is grey and demoralizing and sad, but on the other hand history teaches us that when financial interests are after legitimate innovation, they tend to get more involved, purge people they don't like from personnel with horrifying zeal, involve glowies even if the field has absolutely no connection to national security, and straight up persecute people who take the funding and then fail to deliver results - and most attempts will fail, that's how innovation works. If they want results they'll use any measure they can to accelerate them. Meanwhile personnel safety goes out the door and internal academic relations get a hundred times more adversarial and cut-throat. Now we're biting our thumbs at the guys on the other floor, in those conditions putting people to work on actively sabotaging them might become imperative to survival.

So I'm not sure I'm saddened by not living in interesting times, research-wise. I'm fine genotyping muh durr and not being whipped into breakneck sprint only to find out I'm utterly and permanently fucked through no fault of my own. There are no golden ages.

>>16703311
Not that bothered about sandniggers.

>>16703329
People should study what they want, provided the funding is got through entirely consensual means. No taxes funding fart phds.

>>16703712
>do cocaine and work your joints to the bone
This is why life expectancy used to be 50.

>>16703712
Doing well-protocoled lab work for 12 hours a day for extended periods of time is not hard because it's actually physical labor but with minimal strain. Compare field work where everyone knows to keep to reasonable labor day.

Writing papers, reading and understanding new publications, actually designing experiments and coming up with new protocols - that is, doing actual mental labor - becomes highly inefficient after 3-4 hours, and impossible after 5-6.

>>16705667
>I would rather go through the boring slog of current academic life than take risks and do something of substance
horrifyingly grim

>>16705644
>this is not conducive to innovation or scientific progress.
It is, though.
Things that are publishable in high impact journals are things that are innovation and progress, no matter how much people want to pray this away. People who act like it's all worthless, they only see the tip of the iceberg. It's the plane image again.

Sure, a lot of it might not go anywhere, but some will and the ones that do, those basically pay for all the ones that didn't.

>>16705735
The anon I’m responding to is literally saying it’s a closed club of nepobabies. I don’t trust a single claim about muh high impact when connections matter more than merit in order to get published there. It may as well be a fashion magazine at this point.

>>16705736
>I don’t trust a single claim about muh high impact when connections matter more than merit in order to get published there
It's not nepotism specifically, the problem is a little different:
It's excessively difficult for people to compete at that level, without extreme amounts of resources. It looks like a nepo club because all the top professors, obviously, know each other, but that's not what makes them top ranking. What makes them top ranking is that they have infinitely more money than anyone else. They can just throw money at the problem (read: hire people and buy expensive equipment) until it is solved. They also have no real time pressure either. They can basically just throw money at it indefinitely and as they get more of these top journal papers, they get more money. It's a self-feeding cycle that makes the standards of evidence higher and higher and the pressure on the people trying to break into these journals higher and higher.

It's not nepotism, it's just good old fashioned money.

>>16705738
>What makes them top ranking is that they have infinitely more money than anyone else.
Again, this has nothing to do with merit. Just because someone has a bazillion dollars doesn't make them the next Dirac. I am feeling extreme American vibes from your post. Not everything revolves around money, especially when it comes to scientific thought. Grothendieck came from an anarchist family and was a de facto refugee for most of his life. That didn't stop him from revolutionizing algebraic geometry.

>>16705743
You are confusing the gay science for actual progress-driving innovations.
If you want actual, material progress being the smartest boy in the room won't help you accomplish that. You need resources. You money to pay salaries, you need money to buy instruments. You can't get away with just being smarter than everyone else, because even if someone isn't, if they can outspend you and are under less pressure to perform (meaning they don't have to cut their losses on their projects early to force a publication out), they will beat you every time. Even if you are the greatest at whatever your field is.
Scientific progress is a game of spending money.

>Dirac
>Grothendieck
I will say, that I don't know how theoretical physics works or how mathematical research works, but I know how the experimental sciences operate. Maybe it is different for theoretical work, but if you need a computing cluster to do your calculations, consider that someone with a better cluster and more time on it, doing the same thing you are doing will still beat you to the punch. Even though the difference is just the money they spent vs the money you spent.

It's all about spending money.

>>16705750
>you are confusing actual drive for human curiosity and understanding for soulless engineering designed to make more goyslop so I can CONSOOOOOOOOOM
An American, 100%. You people don't even understand what science is in the first place.

>>16705752
So whata is science then?

>>16705754
Understanding the world around us. You coming up with a way to cook BigMacs in lard 1.3% more efficiently isn't science. It's engineering.

>>16705757
Well, good luck with that, I hope you make enough money in that endeavor to enjoy one of those big macs.

>>16705761
>money money money
Seriously, why are you people like this? You would rather be muttering orange billionaires than gain an inkling of erudition.

>>16705763
You'll understand when you have to pay your own bills.

>>16705764
I do pay my own bills. I just don't feel the need to lease Ford F150s and mortgage McMansions. Try it. You can spend all that free time pondering the world around us instead of constantly paying off debts.

>>16705765
So tell me what some "real science" is.

>>16705766
What do you want to know? I'm personally a HEP theory guy.

>>16705767
Well, I'm happy for you.
I'm looking into buying my third mcmansion, personally.

>>16705768
I'm sorry that money is the only teleological object in your life, anon. Some of us have actual passions and interests in life. May YHWH have mercy on you and your shekels.

>>16705771
>Some of us have actual passions and interests in life.
I have many passions and interests, but what I use to fund them is not one of them.
Are you a patron of the arts?

>>16705772
I unironically believe that arts and sciences died the moment we went from aristocrats patronizing them to the government shitting out grants. Just look at any "public art" project and cringe away.

>>16705773
>Just look at any "public art" project and cringe away.
The problem with that is largely that these grants are assigned by committee and these comittees often don't really know what they're doing.

>>16705775
As opposed to science grants? Can you connect the dots now? Can you see why
>just throw money at it dude anyone with money can drive research
is a nonsensical statement? If everyone would have been Trump, then no actual research would take place because guess what, you need intelligent people for that.

>>16705779
The people who have A LOT of money to pursue their scientific work, they don't get that from government-funded grants, but private industry.
It is cheaper to pay a professor to do research than to do it in house.

>>16705780
>he still doesn't get the point
If I assemble a team of 100 billionaires who all have a combined IQ of 100 (see Trump) and a team of middle class exceptionally talented people who don't have muh connections and muh resources and tell them to come up with a novel model explaining the strong CP problem, who do you think will come up with anything substantial first? I think you know the answer.

>>16705782
>who do you think will come up with anything substantial first?
The billionaires, because they'll just buy out all of the top experts in the field.
You are the one who doesn't get it.

>>16705783
So the billionaires came up with what exactly? Taking credit for someone’s work isn’t innovating. If you breed a soulless culture where everyone wants to be that idiot billionaire, suddenly there’s no one left to hire and you have to import people from abroad. Past forward a few decades and suddenly your academia is filled with foreign-born chinks, jeets, russian jews, and yuropeons. It’s basically claiming that you’re the fastest man on earth because you sponsor Usain Bolt.

>>16705786
What I am trying to make you understand is that, if the goal is getting the novel model, then throwing money at the problem is a valid method to reach that goal and likely one that will produce a result much more quickly than a bunch of people who don't have money can.

Science is a collaborative effort, after all.

>>16705792
And what I'm trying to say is that money isn't the bottleneck here. You can have a gazillion bazillion dollars, but if your societal structure is completely hostile to talent getting to the top through merit, what you'll end up doing is hiring drooling retards whose daddy threw money at the educational system. You need talented people first and foremost. And when those talented people simply don't exist, money doesn't do anything. And the current academic structure is exactly that confederacy of dunces who think they're hot shit because their professor daddy secured them a spot. Intelligence and talent aren't heritable, otherwise you'd be hearing of Einstein Jrs and Euler XII or something.

>>16705799
You still don't get it.
Money is the bottleneck. Money is always the bottleneck. It's always about having money.
If you are a guy who is really, really smart, but you have to spend 8 hours a day working at mcdonalds, you won't amount to anything. But if you have enough money to just do your thing, you'll probably get it done, especially if you are collaborating with others who are also really, really smart.

This is how research works broadly, you throw money at people and try to keep them happy, so they'll produce results, because if you don't have to worry about anything other than producing results, you're a lot more productive than someone who has to work part time at mcdonalds. You don't need exceptional people, you just need people who are willing dedicate themselves to a problem and let them do that.
Science is a collaborative effort.

>>16705811
No, money isn't the bottleneck for one simply reason: money isn't the thing doing research. Talented people do research. Remove talented people from the equation and no amount of money can produce research. I understand that such a claim is preposterous in the mind of an American who worships the green piece of paper above all, but this isn't really rocket science. Research works by having brains. Soviet scientists managed to come up with models of superconductors and superfluids with a fraction of the budget the US scientists had. How? The Soviet educational system prioritized personal merit over money and connections. It's that simple.

>>16705814
>How?
Because they had their salaries paid, of course. And they were quite good salaries for the soviet union.

It's all about resource allocation. As you said, people do research, but people can only peform if they get paid. I'll reiterate my point, you think any of those exceptional super genuises you like to worship as heroes could have done what they did, if they had to work 40 hours at mcdonalds every week on top of their scientific pursuit?
It's just about managing time and energy, you know. Giving people money solves that problem.

>>16705815
My man, I think we're talking over each other. If talented people have no opportunity to get paid these salaries in the first place because their spot was taken by a useless idiot, then who's going to do the research? All the talented people are flipping burgers, there's no one left.

Is the concept of meritocracy so alien to you? Where is the virtue in hiring people just because their daddy is rich? Is that why you bomb random countries? You just have no notion of fairness or Kant's categorical imperative? You know, treat others as you'd want to be treated yourself.

>>16700903 (OP)
Keep shitposting on 4chan. Loks like it's working for you.
https://calnewport.com/some-thoughts-on-grad-school/

>>16705822
The key disagreement is fairly simple:
You value individual performance much more highly than me.
My assertion is that if you throw enough resources and time at a problem it will likely be solved. It doesn't matter that some of the people aren't the best or that some are complete idiots, it all averages out in the mid-term.

>Is the concept of meritocracy so alien to you?
Not at all.
It's just that I'd consider people who can acquire and leverage more resources to produce more merit than those who have less access to resources. Why do you struggle with this idea?

>Where is the virtue in hiring people just because their daddy is rich?
If I hire a nepobaby and daddy gives me enough to pay 3 salaries, then I can hire the nepobaby and two people who I know are competent (and the nepobaby may well also be competent).
It's win/win for everyone.

I don't know why you struggle with this. Acquire resources, leverage resources.
Are you third worlder? Is that why you bluster at how brazenly I am talking about the role of money in science?

>>16705836
>My assertion is that if you throw enough resources and time at a problem it will likely be solved.
>Solved=no more slush fund.
Cures end research, modified treatments are a subscription model.

Live service, or live service?

>>16705836
>You value individual performance much more highly than me.
That's true. I'm guessing this is a theorist vs experimentalist issue more than anything.
>acquire and leverage more resources to produce more merit
>Why do you struggle with this idea?
because you don't produce intellectual merit by throwing money at it. You can spend a fortune educating a person with Down's, hire private tutors, push them into a top college through connections. At the end of the day, it's not going to fix their brain and not going to make him produce original research.

The only way to acquire intellectual merit is to foster a culture that rewards intellectual merit. If someone's a talented person born on a farm in Montana who spends every breathing moment attending the local library, spending every penny buying textbooks on Amazon, etc etc, but then gets shot down from attending a good school because something something holistic judgement something something legacy admissions something something connections, you're losing on potential talent. And instead of scooping up that talent better, you just choose to throw more money at the problem until maybe one of those 10 people you hired isn't a useless nepobaby by some miracle.
>If I hire a nepobaby and daddy gives me enough to pay 3 salaries, then I can hire the nepobaby and two people who I know are competent
And where do you get those two competent people? All the competent people got sieved out by nepobabies with connections. They were forced to attend worse schools. How do you distinguish them from the sea of mediocrity at those schools? What is even the point of "top schools" if they say nothing about competence?
>I don't know why you struggle with this. Acquire resources, leverage resources.
You struggle with understanding that money isn't the only resource. Your research model is
>I'll get 10x more money than you so I can hire 10x more people than you even though 90% of them are useless
which is exceptionally inefficient.

>>16705822
>Is the concept of meritocracy so alien to you?
It's empirically proven to be alien to human civilization. Whenever we set up a system that's supposed to reward people according to a measure of merit it ends up rewarding people who game the measure. h-index was supposed to be the epitome measure of merit and look where it got us.

That said I agree that many problems inherently cannot be solved without involving exceptional individuals and putting them in exceptional circumstances. I also disagree that the current system inherently filters out exceptional individuals - some nepobabies are indeed brilliant, and some pauper naturals do get through. I do think that the system actively prevents exceptional circumstances, because ultimately it is not interested in innovation. But once again I don't find it inherently bad.

The marginal utility of adding more geniuses to academia drops so fast, that it would be preferable to have it consist of mostly aristocratic nepobabies and focus on kicking the dumbest ones OUT instead of bringing the smartest proles IN.
Unjust social class systems are good, actually. They ensure there is enough high quality human capital available to build and maintain a civilization of high standards.

>>16700903 (OP)
A word of advice: read real books and write on real paper with real words.

Smelly caaaaaat
Smmm-ELLY CAT
What is that PHD?

>>16705847
>I'm guessing this is a theorist vs experimentalist issue more than anything.
That is correct, I can get a lab monkey and dictate experiments and it'll work out.

>because you don't produce intellectual merit by throwing money at it.
But you do.
People need to eat and drink and relax. It's how you get them to perform. Again, if you're flipping burgers, you're not doing scientific work.
Science is a job people do to survive, not a "noble intellectual pursuit". If you had to live under a bridge, you wouldn't write novel theorems, even as the most dedicated theoretician. You'd worry about more pressing matters.
Why do you not get it?

>The only way to acquire intellectual merit is to foster a culture that rewards intellectual merit.
So you'd reward people who do well. You hire them to do a science job for you and you make the science job well paid.

>And where do you get those two competent people?
I'm sure there's two competent people in the world looking for a job right now.

>They were forced to attend worse schools.
Luck is also a skill.

>You struggle with understanding that money isn't the only resource.
I never said that, but money can go a long, long way, because you can just hire expertise.

>which is exceptionally inefficient
But if I have a lot of money, I don't have to worry about splitting every penny, I can waste money. And if the 10% produce a hit paper that can be used for another funding run, then it's still a win.

>>16700903 (OP)
>Literature PhD
Could there be someone in the arts who studied the wrong thing and should instead study the sciences to help solve issues? Aren't the arts a great drain on the possible talent pool that the sciences need? Shouldn't everyone get a humanistic, scientific education in high school? Then the top students should be forced to take a science degree, in my opinion.

>>16700903 (OP)
here's the solution:
find a proper advisor (art by itself)
10 kiss ass
20 goto 10

>>16700905
Equally important, enjoy what you're studying