Creating a positive lab culture (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Creating a positive lab culture (2020)

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40 pointsgreghn12 comments

It might be worthwhile to reconsider how qualified Celeste Kidd is to teach how to foster a healthy lab culture: https://reason.com/2022/03/14/how-an-academic-grudge-turned-...

TL;DR: Kidd's accusations about her colleagues were found to be unsubstantiated in four separate investigations. Not just unsubstantiated, but in some cases outright proven false. She claimed Jaeger groped a woman at a party, when in reality said woman was Jaeger's girlfriend who confirmed all contact was consensual. Kidd herself was proven to have engaged in the very behavior that she is claiming does not happen.

Wow, her involvement went beyond that it seemed, and the campaign against that colleague repeatedly interviewed people and then lied about those interviews to fabricate incidents. Honestly thats sick.

At my lab, a positive culture is viewed as a very bad sign. So bad in fact that it may necessitate IV antibiotics.

UBC in general has a very good research culture - the lab I was in was absolutely amazing in the ECE department. Ideas where constructively criticized, but never the person. Hours were reasonable, though you typically decided yourself what “reasonable” meant to you. Which was perfect! 12-9pm? Sure! 10-4? Fine! As long as you made progress it was all good. People bounced ideas off each other all the time. It was a really amazing environment.

Wow, I had to jog the memory about Kidd (she used to be on DeviantArt a lot, and I did a portrait of her some 20 years ago: https://www.deviantart.com/zeruch/art/celeste-in-triplikidd-...) so this was all a very strange trip down the deja vu hole.

All the back and forth about her (and I generally look at Cato/Reason with a bit of scrutiny at this point) the whole thing seems a bit surreal.

This posting wasn't by or about Kidd though:

> Inspired by her words

Is this an example of positive lab culture? To me it reads like a horror story!

Imagine you are poor, take a massive-life-crippling loan, and pay $100 per hour for education at top university! And they come with this kinder-garten stuff!

Did you mean "growing lab cultures"?

I think I would have struggled in the lab climate as discussed in this article. My grad school experience (experimental physical science) was intense with very high expectations for hours in the lab and just as intense interactions with fellow students and faculty. But this other end of the spectrum comes off as equally exhausting.

A policy that only allows criticism of ideas is a poor policy. Criticizing the ideas of a person who consistently generates poor ideas doesn’t help that person to generate better ideas. That person’s idea generating process (and by extension, that person) is what must be criticized constructively. To do otherwise is to open the door to bad actors.

The policy still allows criticism of people, just not in everyday discussion - which is correct, because it doesn't belong there. A person can be criticized (i.e. critically evaluated) by their manager, or perhaps by the person's peers privately telling their manager.

But "criticize the idea, not the person" is a ground rule of any healthy intellectual culture. Criticizing people in a discussion about ideas immediately shits up the atmosphere. It's uncivilized.

If someone consistently generates poor ideas, figure out some way to tell them respectfully after the fact or get their manager to do it. Either the person needs to fix their process somehow or they're not suitable for the environment. These both sound like things a manager should be judging because they are.

That’s an interesting perspective. However, I maintain my position. Banning criticism of people is too general an abstraction and opens the door to bad actors. An article posted today (“I don’t need your query language”) offers a good concrete example.

In an environment where I am unable to criticize a person’s approach (and by extension, that person) I and the rest of the team are at the mercy of their idiosyncrasies (I am referring to the syntax issues highlighted in the first example of the mentioned article).

Escalation via managers can work in specific situations but it has no guarantee of success and comes at a significant cost. In the best case it exists as an extra layer of indirection that must be paid for.

A technical solution, which is what you are proposing, is a poor solution when a better structured policy obviates the need for it.

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