I’m confused about the claim that the academic process is at all misaligned with his original dream. Isn’t doing original research and getting published the clearest path—though perhaps not the only one—on the way to the goal of restructuring quantum mechanics? Isn’t helping his advisor and other professors do their research one of the best ways of learning the ropes in the meantime? Isn’t acquiring the respect of your colleagues exactly the path to having a whole community and field at your back to effect those paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, instead of going it alone?
Empirically, it seems like, if your goal is to restructure a field, maybe getting a day job working in a patent office is better than trying for tenure straight out?
I grant that these stories might have observational biases, because the whole outsider/underdog thing is just so picturesque, but...
If you’ve applied for tenure track spots without success for two years, maybe spend 3 years in a patent office writing up and polishing a solid paper or four about what you actually think is important and true? Then keep working at the patent office till the universities come begging you to share some of your halo with them in exchange for cash?
If someone that you don’t respect at all says something true, and grounded in data, and so on… you should probably believe it even in SPITE of them having never done any favors for you.
Another example: maybe Kariko just tried to go relatively “straight up”… and then no one really funded her, so then in 1995 she basically fell back down “out of orbit”, and her career would have ended if she had just left (like a lot of people who bomb out of academia)… but instead she kept plugging away as an adjunct (helped by a soft landing she found in the lab of Drew Weissman). Then just 10 more years of working in relatively obscurity until a breakthrough in 2005.
This paper reported something very important, despite the fact that its lead author never got tenure and had relatively little “respect”… doesn’t make the paper not important.
(Even so… after that point, Kariko just needed 8 years more to find a stable place in industry. Then just 7 more years until a global medical emergency comes along where her vaccine technology can save the day, and then she started to win a pile of awards (but still no Nobel?) and drop quotes like:
Karikó said that biotech has a lot of upsides over academia. “We have to have a product that is functional and will cure people. It was just so much better than a paper, then another paper that maybe nobody will read.”
I’m not saying you can’t get quite a bit of prestige and gubmint money from gladhanding your way through academia and juking your education stats with MPUs and other tricks.
I’m just saying that if you optimize for respect in a domain funded by a government bureaucracy you’re likely to get respect in the short run… but (to me) it isn’t obvious that people who make big intellectual contributions are also optimizing in this same way.
An ideal academia has NEVER been well characterized by meta-scientists, and the best take on this I know has made progress by postulating that science makes rational progress mostly through a judiciously diverse mixture of the insane mistakes of its scientists who follow through on their private hunches even with they individually rationally selfishly… should not.
I’m responding to your comment here:
Empirically, it seems like, if your goal is to restructure a field, maybe getting a day job working in a patent office is better than trying for tenure straight out?
I grant that these stories might have observational biases, because the whole outsider/underdog thing is just so picturesque, but...
If you’ve applied for tenure track spots without success for two years, maybe spend 3 years in a patent office writing up and polishing a solid paper or four about what you actually think is important and true? Then keep working at the patent office till the universities come begging you to share some of your halo with them in exchange for cash?
If someone that you don’t respect at all says something true, and grounded in data, and so on… you should probably believe it even in SPITE of them having never done any favors for you.
In the same way that argument screens off authority, in good clean reasoning, it also screens off “respect”.
Another example: maybe Kariko just tried to go relatively “straight up”… and then no one really funded her, so then in 1995 she basically fell back down “out of orbit”, and her career would have ended if she had just left (like a lot of people who bomb out of academia)… but instead she kept plugging away as an adjunct (helped by a soft landing she found in the lab of Drew Weissman). Then just 10 more years of working in relatively obscurity until a breakthrough in 2005.
This paper reported something very important, despite the fact that its lead author never got tenure and had relatively little “respect”… doesn’t make the paper not important.
(Even so… after that point, Kariko just needed 8 years more to find a stable place in industry. Then just 7 more years until a global medical emergency comes along where her vaccine technology can save the day, and then she started to win a pile of awards (but still no Nobel?) and drop quotes like:
I’m not saying you can’t get quite a bit of prestige and gubmint money from gladhanding your way through academia and juking your education stats with MPUs and other tricks.
I’m just saying that if you optimize for respect in a domain funded by a government bureaucracy you’re likely to get respect in the short run… but (to me) it isn’t obvious that people who make big intellectual contributions are also optimizing in this same way.
An ideal market can be characterized by economists, and they can prove theorems about its overall idealized properties.
An ideal academia has NEVER been well characterized by meta-scientists, and the best take on this I know has made progress by postulating that science makes rational progress mostly through a judiciously diverse mixture of the insane mistakes of its scientists who follow through on their private hunches even with they individually rationally selfishly… should not.