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Companies live or die by the value that they create for their customers. Films win or lose by the entertainment they provide. Musicians get rich or stay poor by the number of fans who enjoy their music etc. The post is saying that people in academia (Except those at the top institutions) are not judged by the value that they create for science and that this gets in the way of good science in many institutions. Science is not the kind of market where the most beneficial outcomes are automatically selected and the author is upset with how incentives and low odds of success are aligned to make his life in science anxious and unfulfilling. One can scold the author for complaining or one can take him seriously on his points about how society should better benefit from the money it spends on science.

I think you miss the pint slightly. Tons of musicians make great music, but the supply of good music is much higher than the market for listening can absorb. I have friend sin bands that play great music. They will never make it big because they're in such a crowded field only dumb luck or sheer brilliance will make them be picked up by the market.

So the point is that - even if people in academia are producing brilliant, applicable, great research, the truth is that academia produces more supply,than the market can bear. In such a case, it's like great musicians - most will have to be overlooked and only a tiny few will make a difference, either through brilliance, dumb luck or evil plotting.

Your examples are about popularity, whereas with science you switch to value. These are far from equivalent. Films win or lose by the entertainment they provide, but do the best ones win? No, rather the ones that can convince the most people to watch them win. It's quite possible that an unpopular movie would have provided a lot more entertainment if more people had gone to see it, but since they didn't, it loses. Likewise with music: just because some musician attracted a lot of fans doesn't mean those fans wouldn't enjoy some obscure musician more, they just never really made the choice.

I think it's useful to ask whether science is actually different in this respect, or whether this is merely an aspect of a universal problem.

>The post is saying that people in academia (Except those at the top institutions) are not judged by the value that they create for science and that this gets in the way of good science in many institutions.

That's because the "value they create for science" is far too diffuse for anyone to care. They need to bring in grant money, something people do care about, or find something else to do.

> really the only way forward that doesn't result in eternal loss of control of your efforts to sociopaths with no interest in your happiness or society's well-being is to blaze your own path forward

That is exactly why a lot of academics chose the academic career in the first place. There was a lot more freedom to pick your own problem and work on it than you'd enjoy in the average corporate job. There still is, for the most part. But if that advantage is eroding, it's worth talking about.

It's naive to expect that just because you choose academia, that you have a reasonable expectation to gain your freedom without a lot of path-blazing. It was naive before and it's definitely naive now. Just look at the numbers. How many post-docs vs how many tenured professors?

If you looked at the numbers and decided to try it anyway, you only have yourself to blame if you fail after throwing away years of your life. You didn't blaze a path, you didn't do things substantially different than your forebears.

If you naively didn't look at the numbers and kept going out of blind faith, then sorry, you wasted your twenties and got only hard experience to show for it. Don't feel too bad, 90% of your academic peers are doing the same thing. I wasted my twenties too doing stupid things. Probably most of us did. Just don't pass your thirties the same way and you should be fine.

It may be naive today but it wasn't a generation ago, when the numbers were more favorable to a young PhD. Something has changed, which is why people write articles to say, "Hey, stuff's changed!"

It was still naive then. Students should have seen the huge numbers pouring in. They should have done the soul-searching then. You have to keep your head up and nose to the wind if you want any success at all in this world. It's always been that way, you're naive if you believe an institution can engineer success for you. No matter how many of your peers believe the same way you do.

In the 1950s-1960s, the university system was expanding, in part due to the post-WWII GI Bill. Anyone with a PhD was pretty much guaranteed a decent job.

A pyramid scheme works well when the pyramid is expanding. It doesn't work so well when the tip of the pyramid is shrinking.

If EACH tenured professor has 1 graduate student per 3-5 years, that's nowhere close to the rate at which new tenure track jobs open up. There are some private sector jobs for Math PhDs, but even those have an oversupply.

Not everyone is an entrepreneur. We shouldn't predicate scientific progress on the ability of our most brilliant minds to also be brilliant entrepreneurs. It would be a huge disservice to mankind. Some people know how to look at an atom and unlock the universe. How do we change the system to let them do that?

>The ones that succeed learn how to increase the demand for the services they want to provide. The ones that don't bitch about how unfair everything is.

Eh, given the oversupply in academia, it really isn't fair to compare your situation to it. We're talking about orders of magnitude in the disparity between supply and demand in academe vs. the usual competition like in SV, I'd say.

Of course they'll face it elsewhere, the sociopaths who will control their lives. As someone said below, the disappointment is that academia is just like the rest of the world.Still, I think they need to be told it by articles like the linked so more fresh college grads won't go down that path.