Hacker News Reader

Comment by bumby | Hacker News Reader

How would you rephrase it? Does “science have a toxicity problem?”

Academia? Humans in general?

Eric Weinstein has a theory that it's caused by the embedded growth obligations in our institutions.

I'm not sure it's the answer, but I think there is something seriously amiss with our institutions that causes them to all have a similar set of self silencing momentum. The amount of corruption that has been exposed in institutions over the last 20 years that has gone largely ignored in traditional media and inside this institutions themselves is staggering. Every time we hear institution X has a problem with Y, the story quietly disappears and there is no institutional change enacted.

https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/eric-weinstein-intelle...

My personal experience has been that, once an organization reaches some critical mass in terms of size, the primary goal seems to be to protect the institution itself rather than the stated mission it was created to serve. I’ve often wondered if this is the same mechanism that causes large organizations (e.g., churches, academic institutions) to go astray. I tend to think a diffusion of responsibility tends to go hand-in-hand with growth

"The bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the ever expanding bureaucracy" or something to that effect.

I blame it on exceeding Dunbar's Number and creating different groups inside of an org, which now have different priorities and tribal affiliations, e.g. Ops vs. Engineering vs. Finance, or sub-teams inside of Engineering fighting holy wars about Tool [X].

I’ve heard it described as a “self licking ice cream cone”

I think the Dunbars number idea is interesting in terms of possibly describing how our organizational scaling has outpaced our biology

If you treat it as hazing the problem becomes more manageable.

Ultimately, scientists want to be understood and accepted by their peers and make friends, they are people after all.

A culture of abuse can start when the notion of exclusivity is accepted and outsiders want to join the group, whether that be in a single research group or within a field of study.

The problem is exacerbated by greedy individuals, and limited pools of funding to carry out research.

In turn, the greediest are the most exclusive, and the most prone to toxic behavior and chronic hazing.

Maybe we can blame the anonymity of the internet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com