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Comment by knzhou | Hacker News Reader

Nobody forces academics to work for low pay. I mean, that's what I'm doing right now and I certainly don't feel exploited.

> Then there is literally decades of over promising on ground breaking discoveries right around the corner (super symmetry, extra dimensions, dark matter).

Suppose all TeV-scale colliders had been defunded in the 90s, including the LHC. Then we would have forever been stuck with the strong suspicion that a Higgs is there, but no proof, along with untested but plausible-sounding well-motivated speculation over what else could be. Is that not worse than actually knowing?

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> I certainly don't feel exploited.

Sure this is your subjective perception, maybe fuelled by the positive reinforcement that rituals of accomplishment provide and the fact that working on physics is really fun. As long as you realise that you are playing a game that is unlikely to yield any economic or societal value (in the case of high-energy physics) at any time-scale with a group of people that have been playing the same game for >20 years with no discernible progress except for the discovery of one particle predicted >40 years ago.

> Suppose all TeV-scale colliders [..]

Well this is hypothetical, but what would most likely have happened is that the ~10000+ scientists involved with the LHC and high-energy physics had gone into different subfields of physics. Hopefully the same would have happened with funding (we don't want it to go to biologists, do we?). Since high-energy physics still attracts some of the best students, this would have actually disproportionately improved human capital in other areas of physics. Whether the Higgs was there or not was never a super pressing concern anyways. Condensed matter physics, bio-physics, environmental physics, all kinds of (mostly experimental) quantum physics still have discoveries to be made with ~1-10s of million in budget. Not only that a lot of those discoveries will have society level consequences in a time frame of decades. We are in contrast very unlikely to derive any benefit from studying the energy scales high-energy physics has reached. For those reasons I think funding high-energy physics is a huge net negative to overall societal progress.

While it is true that nobody forces you to work for low pay - there is definitely misleading advertising at play.

Most young people that pick science do not understand the "real" rules of science, and what it takes to "succeed". Being a good, reliable, hard-working scientists will not ensure your success.

Whereas in many if not most jobs, being good at the job itself usually suffices.

I know what the rules are. In fact the community seems to be extremely transparent about it -- there are sites that keep track of all job offers out there for you, along with historical statistics.

The struggle for jobs is the result of the government funding structure, plus supply and demand. It's not perfect, but it's infinitely preferably to the older system, where you could reliably do science only if you had great personal wealth, or were favored by somebody who did.

First and foremost, we are talking in general, about young scientists. Do you think they all know what they sign up for? I for one, having seen many hundreds of them, I don't think so.

Then I will say, job offers are not relevant here. Who gets the job offer? What do they have to actually do in that job? Where are they going to be in 10 years? What kind of life, job security, job conditions, career advancement prospects do you have over the long term? For most scientists, these are the most nebulous concepts ever.

You may think you know what the job is - maybe, I wouldn't know.

What I do know that most people do not understand that a PI (principal investigator) at a University does nothing even remotely similar to what a postdoc (who wants to be a PI does)/ The churn and exploitation is very common.

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