I guess we're doing this then. Fuck it, time for the essay on why modern science is grounded in fraud and failure. For those in chinkland or countries with even more ridiculous systems, this is going to be very US centric.
Money: The source of most problems in science.
Scientific funding is in and of itself a labyrinthine mess with countless possible sources of funding each clinging to different ideals on how it should be distributed.
Let's start with how university professors handle money. A professor's salary is typically drawn from undergraduate attendance revenue, excepting if they spend grant money to excuse themselves from teaching courses. Given that most professors suck at getting grant money, this creates the need for the department to constantly bring in undergraduates to cover professor and general department staff wages. Professors however are promoted and granted tenure based on research, so any undergraduate activities are inherently wasteful to them, and hence undergraduate course rigor and quality diminishes with time. The exception to this is teaching professors, who don't do research. Still, the overwhelming undergraduate student : professor ratio necessitates that adjuncts and graduate students will end up teaching a lot of courses at most universities. It's even worse with grading, which further cuts into professor time unless doled out to grad students. Graduate students writ large, excepting fake degrees and master's degrees (2nd undergrad degree), are billed to the professor as research assistants unless they're registered as teaching assistants. Teaching assistants are those grad students wasting endless hours teaching and grading undergrads and are paid for by the department through undergraduate revenue. Research assistants are paid for out of the professor's grant money or start up funds. Start up funds are department funds handed over to new professors when they join the department to cover their expenses until they get grant money rolling in. It costs at least 80k a year to cover a graduate student's expenses, which will include living stipend, insurance, tuition, and overhead for the university to pay off an ever expanding cast of administrative assistants. As a rule of thumb, about 40% of any grant money brought in by the professor is snatched away by the department as overhead to cover various expenses not otherwise covered by undergraduate tuition. University professors are somewhat limited in their ability to get the big grant money, and will usually depend on government organizations like the NSF for funding. At Ivy Leagues, you might also have private money coming in and some professors have learned the dark arts of industry money to round things out. These are exceptions, not the rule.
National laboratories are similar to university professors except there are no undergraduates. Instead, they get to play with an even bigger and even faster expanding cast of useless administrative staff who soak up near infinite money, which leads their grants and wages to come with overhead fees exceeding 50% of the grants they receive oftentimes. It's about 200k in grant money to cover a postdoc, 300k+ to hire a staff member. So where does this money come from? Well, it's rarely as simple as federal tax money paying federal employees. No, most national labs are contractor based and waste most of their time writing grants. The national labs receive a certain amount of federal money each year to use as they choose, but it is never remotely enough to cover staff, building, and equipment costs. So instead, the employees at federal laboratories write grants to agencies like the NSF, DOD, DOE, and anyone else that will listen. Further, because national laboratories are in fact made up of many divisions, they will fight over access to equipment, postdocs, and parking spaces depending on whose division received grant money to pay for what things. This leads to laughably inefficient usage of all said things, overlapping projects covering the same research fields, and general feelings of mistrust, competition, and backstabbing amongst peers at the same lab. National laboratories are known for paying post docs very well, albeit below industry pay. They are not known for paying staff well, and thus constantly lose their best scientists to universities and industry, who both pay far better and have less drama. If you want something at a university and you have grant money to pay for it, it's yours. If you want something at a national laboratory and you have grant money to pay for it, you need to stand trial to justify your expenses, research vision, and broader impacts. There is also a neverending push toward diversity by the DC bureaucrats, who seem to think that the national labs are responsible for educating blacks and hispanics. East asians might as well be white men at this point for diversity considerations.
Industry has seemingly endless money. It's just almost completely wasted because most people go to industry to retire in a 9-5 job. Intel is a joke. IBM is a joke. Google is full of pajeets. Don't get me started on Tesla. Apple won't be satisfied until the fruit cult consumes all religiosity. Pharma and big ag are usually innovating though, but their funding is pegged toward the maximization of evil and the comfort of death fats. In other words, I highly recommend shooting for an industry job if you find yourself in the unfortunate position of having a PhD. Just be sure to get a good hobby, 'cause you're going to need it.
TLDR: University bad because undergraduates fund most of the operation for professors who hate them. National laboratory bad because government makes its employees dance like circus elephants for funding. Industry bad because it attracts useless, stupid people it won't fire.
Publishing Research: The trouble with impact factor.
So, you got through all that nasty business of teaching undergraduates, writing grants, or sucking the genitals of whatever beltway bureaucrat controls the money teat. You have money now! How do you keep getting more money, promotions, and the validation that your crippling social anxiety demands? H index, of course.
You need to constantly be publishing lots of papers that get lots of citations. This creates a bit of a problem. You can't endlessly break new ground that warrants 400+ citations on multiple papers a year. Now, if you're a "good" scientist, this is where you tell your wife that she's free to sleep with other men because the children could use a father figure in their lives. You'll slave away endlessly writing more grants to pay for more grad students/post docs so that you can have a never ending paper mill of papers that you conceived of and might have read the abstract of before being sent off for publication. You don't actually review the contents of these papers, but you've got a solid few postdocs that you trust to make sure your grad students aren't making perpetual motion machines. You haven't had to retract a paper yet, so you're right on track for tenure. "Bad" scientists forgo this time honored and true method to becoming a full professor. They go home at 5pm and are present in their kids' lives. How to make up the difference and still reach professor status? Have you tried lying yet? Start embellishing the impact of your papers when you send them in. Exaggerate what you'll do when asking for grants. Make sure to only send your papers into your friends' journals. They're your buddies, so they'll make sure only softball reviewers get to peer review your work. Get a nice circle of friends and you can even take turns citing each other to drive up that citation count at the low cost of your dignity and that last shred of faith that you're benefiting mankind.
Ok, but maybe you're a retarded fuckmonkey. How do you get published in a good journal to collect endless
validation citations and that eventual promotion? Well, you need to start playing
the game. You don't need to be smart and come up with good ideas. You just need to constantly be shifting gears in your research to hop on the bandwagon of every fad that hits the sciences. Did someone invent a new technique? Bill yourself as an expert in it and publish some superficial papers before the low-hanging fruit is harvested. Don't bother wasting your time in well developed fields. It takes a lot of work to get a high impact paper in one of those. You're better off writing a paper like "AI integration of predictive gaussian functions in molecular hydrodynamics." Don't worry if it's not actually useful. As long as you're early to the game, some journal will pick you up.
The worst thing you can do is focus on quality. Stop trying to be perfectly concise and accurate. Make friends, get funding, get tons and tons of assistants in your paper mill, and you'll be a real scientist in no time! Losers who try to innovate can take decades before their research bears fruit. You can't wait that long. You can't start your harem* of nubile graduate students and underling professors if you don't have the H factor to back it up.
* - professors are notorious for having sex with their graduate students. This is a serious problem in universities. Think about this every time you see an old professor getting too handsy with an attractive graduate student. Professors will also get sexual favors from would-be professors on the grounds of career advancement. The more famous professors do this openly and blatantly without shame.
And, I haven't even started my rant about "broader impacts" yet. So, there's another way to get lots of citations. You just need to get into a Nature-type journal. These are the best ones to be published in because they're not really about anything in particular, their readership is basically everyone, and thus you can rake up the most citations the most easily by getting published in one of these well-respected infotainment press releases. Back in the day, these journals were supposed to publish the best and greatest of the scientific world. Now? They're gradually being accepted as a giant fucking waste of time if you want to get important information out quickly without going through a year long review process. They take pride in rejecting papers that don't fit the editor's perceived concept of novelty and the reviewers rarely actually understand what it is they're reviewing, an added downside of a journal with a broad reader/reviewer base. Reviewers are notorious for impossible demands born of pure ignorance of the topics they review.
I haven't even said what "broader impacts" are yet. Good question, who even fucking knows. Supposedly, they're about the wider benefit of your research to society, but you could just as easily start bullshitting like a snake oil salesman. "Green" technology research is filled with stupid papers on impractical shit that nonetheless qualifies as having a broader impact. It seems to mostly be a way to promote whatever the cathedral wants. Might I suggest writing a paper on transgender rights in the field of renewable energy and its intersectionality in racial discrimination in early childhood education? I'm sure there's a buzzfeed article you can steal most of the text from.
TLDR: Modern science rewards publishing lots of papers that you fluff up to pretend are way more important than they really are. Spending lots of time on a few important works will kill your career if you don't break the FTL barrier or invent a cure for heterosexuality.
Scientific Labor: How the sciences got addicted to poorly paid interns.
By now, you've probably noticed a theme here. A good scientist is constantly publishing lots and lots of papers to earn citations to justify getting more money and promotions. You cannot do this alone. What you need are graduate students and post-docs.
How does one get lots of research assistants? Well, it certainly isn't by paying them an industry competitive wage. At time of publishing, a university postdoc can expect to get about $60k per year after getting their PhD, a national lab postdoc will get about $80k. Industry for comparable positions is >$100k. The postdoc industry is maintained on the hope of a full time position of a professorship or staff position at a national laboratory, also childhood neglect, daddy issues, and a host of other psychological problems (but that's also related to why anyone would want to be a scientist in the first place instead of going into big law). It's even worse for PhD students, who regularly get <$30k per year. Berkeley students are so badly paid for the bay area that they're known to go into debt while in the phd program. Right off the bat, you can see why scientists want to be professors. You save a fortune by getting PhD students to work in your paper mill instead of postdocs, a price you pay in wasted hours teaching undergraduate students.
Attracting good talent is an eternal problem in the sciences. Ideally, you'd just post a help-wanted sign and some naive white males (or ideally talented diversity candidates) would show up at your doorstep. This is rarely the case. You'll forever suffer a lack of good recruits from promising
ethnic backgrounds schools with the right academic history, assuming you can attract students at all. Students want to be part of a field that either promises a big salary on the other side or innovative research. Even if you've got one of these, chances are you'll still run into issues staffing all of your open spots that you've got funding for. This is where international students come in. Sure, you'll have to wade through an endless sea of pajeets (do not hire these, they are lazy and useless) but there's always the Chinese and Koreans, who you'll be hiring en masse. Aside, I recommend learning Mandarin to help your fresh off the boat students learn the ropes. You can also try getting students from impoverished European countries like Italy or Spain (lmao @ european academic wages).
Really though, the public sciences just aren't well funded enough to run on anything but students and postdocs. You've seen the funding structure of the scientific infrastructure. Professors are paid by undergrads and grants. Staff scientists are paid by grants and a smattering of rare, direct federal money. Hiring full time staff is simply far more expensive and cuts into the efficiency of your paper mill.
Jests aside, US and European scientific funding keeps taking a nosedive year-on-year. The Chinese are ramping up funding exponentially. We've reached the point where good Chinese professors are going back to the mainland. The grant writing scene to cover a scant few postdocs and students is increasingly competitive and only serves to waste more scientist time trying to keep the lights on.
Note: Visiting students and undergraduate research is just something scientists do to satisfy the educational outreach section of NSF grants. If you're lucky, you can find a diversity candidate this way that you'll put on all of your marketing material for the next 10 years. Otherwise, scientists literally can't be arsed to give a shit about someone who won't first author them more papers to please the citation god.
TLDR: Students cheap. Funding rare. Good students rare, and usually foreign. Full time staff expensive. Funding still rare. Your career depends on a reliable source of useful students writing you papers.
Ownership: Who actually owns the research?
Alright, so you've discovered a way to turn liberal fart huffing into a source of renewable energy, who gets the patent and can you start a business turning San Francisco into the next Aramco? This is a more complex problem than you'd think. If you're in the national labs, the answer is the labs own whatever it is you make, pending their decision to give up the patent to you because they don't want it. It's more complicated at the university level. There are a lot of startups and consultancy gigs that get started at universities, research funded by grant money, and the gains enjoyed by the professor. The students get nothing, as is only proper and right for having failed to sacrifice their humanity securing funding and a sufficiently high H index. However, generally, the department/university will try to lay claim to your inventions at the university level. This is something that influential professors negotiate away, but you're fucked as a new professor. In industry, it's generally the case that the company owns anything you make but many companies will reward you financially for creating successful products. Bad companies get a reputation for bad compensation and get bad employees (i.e. pajeets). Good companies look like an East Asian and European ethnostate (lmao @ TSMC trying to integrate diversity hires in the US).
TLDR: Get fucked. You're a scientist. If you wanted to be rich, you'd make a cell phone app that harvests user data for sale to the CCP and advertisers. Now go divorce your wife to take her life savings. She's been cheating on you for years while you've been getting tenure anyhow.
Solutions: Let's fix this mess.
- Money is tight. Reduce the total number of research institutions and departments nationwide. There are far too many to justify this madness. Most of them aren't putting out good work and the funding is spread too thinly. Universities need to be streamlined by discipline to ensure that a strong core can be established at each one. Scientists depend on peer interactions to avoid navel gazing into some irrelevant field and breed better ideas. Raising funding writ large wouldn't hurt, but it won't do a thing if it's wasted on more $200 million buildings.
- Direct federal funding. Do away with most grants. Research institutions need direct federal budgets to be internally distributed without endless paperwork to waste researchers' time. A certain amount of institutional trust is required that they can determine their researchers' postdoc and graduate student needs without excessive favoritism. The sheer mass of research hours wasted on grant writing is astronomical and only spiraling upward. As a certain man with an oversized clock once said, "It's time to stop!"
- Separate undergraduate and graduate education. Undergraduates are retarded. They keep getting more retarded by the year. This is because professors give fewer shits every year about undergraduates and too many (read, dumber) students are admitted every year. Reduce enrollment, only take the best, and have a dedicated staff of teaching professors to educate the undergraduates. Graduate education should be directly federally funded without the expectation of substantial coursework.
- Public scientist pay is shit. Increase pay for researchers to industry rates respective to their field of study. NVidia, Microsoft, and Google shouldn't be the world's leading academic institutions for AI research.
- Shut down administrative spending. This will get easier once undergrad education is ousted from graduate departments. National labs look like a federal jobs program when you look at their staffing, so many useless admins.
- Stop pitting national laboratory staff against each other. Get a dictator in there to shut people up and back to work. Office politics should be an instant sacking.
- Raise expectations of graduate students. Any student that mentions work-life balance should be immediately exiled to industry. Good scientists are forged in fire and Adderall. Break the weak, discard them, and keep the strong. It's the only way to ensure you're not inundated with 9-5 wankers and emotionally fragile wankers.
- Fire old fucks. Fire old professors/scientists that stop doing their job. Fuck tenure. Fire useless, overpaid geriatrics.
- Bully progressives and grifters. Half of your funding nonsense is just faggots in D.C. and the Ivy League promoting globohomo. They must be bullied relentlessly until they 41% themselves. No exceptions. The only union you need is a strong man chancellor with senate connections who will raise hell if funding is insufficient.
No, I don't have a pointpoint deck for this rant, and there will be no tiktok video. Fuck you 3 minute attention span undergraduates who whine that I expected you to read the textbook.
