Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

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I will disagree with every single suggestion you make:

1. Salaries should be -higher-, not lower! Why will any self respective smart person want to throw their intelligence away for a pittance? You want them to be smart with science and stupid with money is it? Live like Diogenes?

2. There shouldn't be more researchers, there should be less. My decade-long experience with academia has been that too many people who aren't exactly scientifically smart (more smart at socializing and grant writing) are too established. We need to recruit the type of minds that are truly capable of innovation and make sure they don't have to compete with beuraucrats who're there simply because they chose biology in undergrad and just kept making the default career choice every time they were presented one. These new people should also be REALLY smart, not just marginally better than public. Which means that there can't be too many of them anyways. They should then be given resources that don't inherently convert the entire system into a Ponzi scheme (like the phd system now does). In the grand scheme of things they can be given lower resources if they are given structures to manage things well.

3. I'd argue that the tenure system worked quite well despite its flaws. If anything tenure doesn't give the same guarantees it gave half a century ago, so people are still incentivized to continue running the rat race. If you still want to hold them accountable maybe a much longer cycle might be okay, perhaps 15 years? 5 year contract sounds like hell for most fields. Some of the most interesting work I did took more than that time to bear fruition and that's not uncommon.

Only thing I'll agree with you is that we should make sure that whatever new process is conceived must try to correct perverse incentives for women, given how the current system plays against some common life choices they might want to make (having kids).

> Why will any self respective smart person want to throw their intelligence away for a pittance? You want them to be smart with science and stupid with money is it?

Because it buys them the freedom to do what they want in terms of research, rather than being a slave to a certain agenda, or a quota, or what have you. Science progresses by empowering curious people. If a researcher was interested in making money, then they would focus on money-making discoveries and spin off startups (which already happens plenty now).

> There shouldn't be more researchers, there should be less. My decade-long experience with academia has been that too many people who aren't exactly scientifically smart (more smart at socializing and grant writing) are too established.

That's because the academic and publishing incentives are all skewed, like the OP said, not because we have too many people doing research. If the low-hanging fruit has been plucked, then we need more eyeballs looking at things from all sorts of different perspectives to find pieces that don't quite fit our established theories.

I have an agreement and a disagreement with your take:

* I agree that reducing salaries for academics will only make the currently misplaced incentives worse. It will deprive society from the valuable research that more competent and talented folks would have done. In my mind, the key point in all these budgetary conversations is the ballooning bureaucratic/administrative layer that is eating up more and more of the budget and making it harder for universities, as collectives of teachers and researchers, to adapt to the evolving priorities of the real world.

* I disagree that there should be less researchers. Fewer academics, maybe, but we definitely need more people who can make a lifestyle out of entirely or partially doing research. My admittedly anecdotal impression is that for every "not exactly scientifically smart" person who secures tenure, there are a handful of would-have-been-great researchers who just get fed up and leave academia despite having the passion, competence, and the willingness to even make a few sacrifices.

IMHO we have cornered ourselves into a false dichotomy (broad strokes here, there are exceptions of course): either (a) you are an academic, you have to pull 60 hr weeks to do any meaningful research, and you have to deal the ossified structural issues of academia, or (b) you are out in the wild, make a lot more money, but you spend your 40 hr weeks towards maximizing short-term profits of your employer. I would think were there a viable alternative to this dichotomy that many passionate and competent people would happily make some reasonable sacrifices (in pay, work hours) to engage meaningfully in much-needed research.

As someone who has now experienced both sides of the dichotomy (80 hr weeks underpaid and overworked in academia, 40hr weeks bored out of mind doing coding), a compromise would be great.

Personally I'm hoping to keep my job to pay the bills and start a garage lab and pursue my passions in science. It'll severely be underfunded, but I'm hoping to conceive things that can be done with machines that hopefully costs only as much as a boat would. Further, Richard hamming is on to something [1] when he suggests that great science happens when resources are scarce.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

I don't think reducing salaries will have any effect on the caliber of academics. There are a ton of graduate students, postdocs, and research scientists glad to work for less. Most are just as qualified as the faculty who supervise them. Likewise, the quality at faculty at elite schools and state schools is identical; the key difference in research output comes from access to resources.

Money isn't everything that motivates people. And you want to get exactly the kinds of people who are motivated by curiosity, not power and prestige.

The salary needs to be enough to live on without financial stress. On the other hand, it doesn't need to guarantee anything beyond cafeteria-grade food, basic housing, and a beat-up old car.

Benefits are important too. Things like university medical, insurance, and retirement policies reduce the risk profile. Academics shouldn't be distracted or stressed by financial constraints, but neither should they be motivated by them.

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