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this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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As a PhD student you'd be surprised at how many stupid people are in here. I've heard of people talking about using holy water in mouse before experimenting because they are "possessed by devil", people talking about how "I'm a liberal but female president isn't going to be strong enough for our country" to their female colleagues, talked with people who told " they[gay people] should just get help" to a gay colleague because her bible says being gay is a sin, those are just extra fun examples, there's a lot more in daily life that after joining PhD I've become a lot skeptic of any research or paper people cite for something. Because lot's of people just write sentences first then search for papers that agrees, instead of doing actual literature review and learning about diverse view on the matter.
I'm not surprised sadly - I have a PhD in chemistry and then continued to a postdoc and teaching before heading elsewhere. During my undergraduate there was a woman on the course who was very good and very competent but was also evangelical to the point of believing in a young Earth. To her, concepts such as half-lives were just lies that needed to be learnt.
Normally that has been flushed out by the time of doing a PhD, but if not it really should be.
How can any of her outcomes be trusted for veracity if she doesn't agree with the material assumptions?
They're poisoning the well by allowing her to stay.
You're in the wrong institution, LOL
PhD is doing something very niche, intelligence and logical thinking makes it easier, but you can easily just submit a paper in multiple journals until one accepts. Of course your advisor and committee are supposed to weed out those people, but in this culture where more students graduated -> faster tenure +more funding, and everything is measured in numbers, everyone is encouraged to increase the numbers instead of quality. So just because you were able to publish something in a small niche field doesn't mean you know a lot about the world, or you agree with what other scientists think.
I know different universities and countries have their own system which probably have higher quality control, but this publish and perish culture combined with the competitiveness and lots of money involved in all steps is bound to game the system towards anti-science. Professors don't really have the luxury of trying things that don't work for years anymore.
it depends. in the US, it's publish or perish if you're in PhD/postdoc phase, but once you're tenure track/faculty it's about get funded or fuck off. The latter is a lot more stringent filter (and not necessarily a great one, like look at the lady who co-invented the mRNA vaccine technology getting booted from UPenn for lack of funding, but yet getting the Nobel). I haven't encountered people with super wacky beliefs beyond a certain level.
Well sometimes when you are a tenured professor, it's really hard to mess up in many cases. I personally know professors that have "gone senile" to put it mildly, if not then it just means they were stupid from the start. That have ridden their one good discovery from decades ago, and can keep getting funding because other orgs are also funding them. Have way too many students than they can handle in their lab, make postdocs do the management, and fire people if they don't publish well. Of course that's the only example I have seen of someone that incompetent. But I have seen mildly incompetent people riding on "collaboration" with other labs and people from university, or by being "cheaper to hire than consultants". Academia in US is a lot like a boy's club of who knows who. And once you have a certain momentum you'll have funds that can support more people than you can manage while new professors will struggle with getting funding and have to use those old professors to get funds and "collaborate" with them. Basically giving away a chunk of funding for their names.
again, it depends. the momentum is completely different at a state university than at a top private research university (personal experience with both). I'm a clinician-scientist, so my pressure is to support my research effort, or be forced to see a lot more patients (for which I'm severely underpaid and undersupported). I'll say science is all about your network, I translate bench researcher's methods to the clinic with a pretty high throughput. Being able to connect researchers, for example a group who developed a mouse model for X with a group who uses technique Y to refine the data, can make one quite popular. That said the main difference between the state uni and the research uni is that at the state, finding good mentorship was very hard (I was very lucky), and at the research uni it is mandated by the institution with protocolized mentorship committees and they only take people whom they know will be able to succeed academically.