It doesn’t matter the industry you’re in the
Schmooze classwill be there to make sure you have to bow to them.It’s always hilarious how excited project managers are about sending their socially awkward developers to conferences like Pokémon off to battle
It’s a lot different in academia vs industry for hard sciences. I currently work in industry, we have no options in the things we research but we are funded to the Moon. There is of course some amount of bowing we have to do in order to keep them quiet but that’s about it.
In academia you have to secure your own funding constantly or your project just ends essentially. Academic institutions also look at metrics like impact factor and papers published/time that also effects the availability of funding. I know that people have had to stop pursuing doctorates due to funding issues. Politics in academia is notoriously horrendous.
It’s always hilarious how excited project managers are about sending their socially awkward developers to conferences like Pokémon off to battle
I did this when I was a manager with the people who wanted opportunity for advancement. I prepared them and told them that getting comfortable public speaking and being around strangers and selling yourself are all critical components of being seen and respected by upper management when the time comes for me to fight for a raise or advancement.
Because the harsh truth is that you don’t climb without being seen, and you’re not seen unless you can speak publically and feel comfortable in your own skin. I’ve seen some deeply introverted people climb to great success but this is because they had a strange combination of extremely sharp skills in critical fields in the company, and they weren’t shy, they were just quiet, when they did talk they shot back zingers and deadpan one-liners that made the people over them either laugh or shrivel.
So whatever “personality type” you think you have, you simply do not rise without playing SOME aspect of the social game, it will always be like this as long as we live in a capitalist society.
This is why good teams are essential. One person to do all the bullshitting, and the rest of the team to actually get stuff done while the bullshitter deflects all the other bullshitters.
PROVIDED the bullshitter doesn’t turn inward. A PM with those skills unleashed on the team is hell, and is guaranteed to drive talent away.
“Bullshitting” is an essential skill, not a distraction. The greatest idea in the world is meaningless if nobody knows about it.
Marketing, scmoozing, etc gets a bad rep. But no matter how good your output, product, research, etc is, it has very little value or impact if people don’t get on board.
If you can’t play the game, team up with someone who can. And don’t forget that while that schmoozer may not have your technical skills, they have a skillset you do not.
It wasn’t Woz or Jobs. It was both.
Yep. We’ve got me a technical guy who loves deep diving in theory and understanding the why of everything, and a smooth talking ex-Navy guy who is good at thinking on his feet and has great mechanical acumen. Last but not least, we have the guy who uses a sick day whenever there’s work scheduled, and then shows up the next day and goes on some libertarian rant about how any progress we’ve made since the 19th century is a sign of our country going down the toilet. Dream team baby
Kick the last one out. Get a fresh out of college graduate in place instead.
Ok so what happens when the bullshitter gets all the recognition and nobody believes you when you try to prove otherwise? Document and take legal action?
Seconded. The “face man” gets to be the public face and thereby a lot of the social credit and perhaps most of the work credit as well.
We see people like this all the time in management who take all the credit for the work from those who actually did the work.
“How do we stop the world’s smartest people from realising what we’re doing?”
“Let’s make them fight among themselves and call it a meritocracy; we’ll limit their funding and let them keep themselves busy with political infighting!”
This “have to play political games to get ahead” bullshit seems to apply almost everywhere.
Yeah, humans are social animals which create social systems everywhere they go. This shouldn’t shock anyone.
They do. However, the quality of a person’s work should be more important than their schmoozing skills. Not a shock, but definitely an annoyance.
This is how any new field of work or science starts out. Then, as money starts to be made, the field comes to the attention of the money- and power-hungry who slowly take it over and transform it into something they can control with politics and shenanigans. These people didn’t have the intelligence or passion or drive to create, but they know how to play people to get what they want. Unfortunately the good people too often let themselves be shmoozed by them and that’s their “in”
I know this term is overused, but it’s essentially enshittification. It didn’t start with the internet.
This might sound pedantic, but it isn’t, it was actually naive: I expected a better environment in academia when I was young.
Why? Because academia is supposedly full of bright people, and I assumed they would be bright enough to be cooperative (because academia advances more when we are, and they supposedly love knowledge); unattached from superficiality (like judging people by their looks, money, etc., because they should know an interesting person can come in any “package”); relatively ethical (as bright people should figure out something close to the categorical imperative, although with unique details); a non-dogmatic, eager to learn and correct their ideas —over preferring recognition and pettiness— attitude (again, just because I assumed their intelligence must guide them towards appreciating knowledge and authenticity over much more ephemeral and possibly worthless things such as prizes, fame, etc.).
I was wrong, so wrong. It’s painful to remember how I felt when I realized it…
But I think the premises weren’t entirely off, I just imagined people much wiser and more intelligent than they are, myself included. Anyway, I fully understand why others are shocked too.
I’m sorry you went through that. I grew up around academics – a few of my parents’ friends were professors and one was a research chemist, then I had several former professors as teachers in high school; the message from them was always clear – academia is awful because of politicking, backstabbing, and the neverending need to be publishing something next week no matter what you did last month.
The quote, often misattributed, “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.” has always stuck with me because of this. As I watched my wife pursue her postgraduate work in Chemistry, I was granted the unfortunate privilege of seeing it first hand. She now works as a children’s librarian and is much happier.
At the top of academia everyone is tenured. Everyone has proved their intelligence. It is so political because there is so little at stake
I’m genuinely confused how everyone is reacting to this. What good is research that no one cares to hear?
The research should speak for itself. Assuming the person judging it is competent, it shouldn’t need to be “sold”.
The thing is, “research” doesn’t speak, humans do. If a tree falls in the woods… and so on. Part of being a scientist is communicating what you’ve done, otherwise no one else will know. It’s a skill that has to be developed in some more than others, and it was a key part of my training as a scientist. I don’t really like that part as much, but I do it because it’s what makes my work have any impact.
The people with the money don’t understand the science. If you can’t convince them that your science is worth investing in then why would they give you money? What’s really shocking is that a Nobel prize winner isn’t smart enough to understand that.
The idea is that those people shouldn’t be the ones with the money.
Then the academics should get better at taking it from them :)
At that point it should become a problem of educating, not politicking.
Competence is judged by their ability to communicate the purpose and results. Lack of social skills also detracts from the audience who is willing to review it.
Valid to a degree, but there’s such a thing as placing too much value on the person presenting it rather than the content of it. It seems like too common an occurrence.
Not an academic, but this is spot on for how I’ve felt as a top performer getting nowhere. This realization helped me reorient my aspirations to what I find truly matters to me: my family and hobbies. I’m a solid individual contributor. Over the years, my work has saved us millions and been adopted across the country, which is reward enough. The speaking engagements and schmoozing, I’ll leave that to the extroverts in the boys club.
This is the fucking world. Like it or not it’s about putting yourself out there and networking. Doesn’t matter how bright you are. I wish it wasn’t but it is.
To put it bluntly, science costs money, and persuading people who control money to spend that money is itself a skill.
Or, zooming out, science requires resources: physical commodities, equipment, the skilled labor of entire teams. The most effective way to marshal those resources is with money, and management/sales skills are necessary to get those resources working together in concert.
notes down: “capitalism is the problem”
👍
Capitalism is always the problem
As someone who can see the flaws in the capitalist model and doesn’t agree with it in its current form… This is just silly. In any socioeconomic system there will be limited resources. People will still have to convince those that control the resources to give them the resources. The biggest difference between science in a capitalist system versus in a socialist system is that the end result of the science might benefit the common person more.
For instance: Superfest. Near unbreakable drinking glasses made in Eastern Germany that didn’t sell well internationally due to lack of profit potential. Basically, the entire glass industry revolves around the principle that glass can be broken. When your glass breaks, you buy a new one. But if your glass doesn’t break then you don’t need to buy a new one and therefore you do not. So if everyone buys Superfest then the industry dies since no one needs to buy glass any longer. And this is great for the people, great for the environment, but terrible if you’re a profit driven company. But whether it’s a state-owned endeavour or a for-profit organization, you’d still need to convince someone to invest in your work.
Going to start you off with Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism
If you’ve ever heard of “publish or perish”, than you’ve heard of the main outcome of managerialism applied to academia and research. There are many critiques, I won’t mention them all. And if you hate bureaucracy, filling out all those endless forms as if your job is to fill out forms, that’s because of managerialism. You’re writing the inputs for that system to work. That goes for the healthcare system too, and for many others.
What we have put forward in this speaking out essay, is, that in its attempt to counter the apocalyp- tical pictured neoliberal competition, the management of a typical university is responding in a Derridean self-harming reflex of power. The university risks turning itself into a mere corporate factory of publications and diplomas, in which quantity is mistaken for quality and control for freedom, thereby derailing itself further and further from its societal function and orientation. By mimicking a hypercompetition inside the organization in order to adapt to the imaginary of a sur- vival-threatening hypercompetition, the modern university has been turning the competition against itself, resulting in a vicious suicidal circle of repression (Derrida, 2003: 100). Worryingly and sadly, the university, that self-declared bastion of autonomous, free, and critical thinking, has been transforming itself more and more into a remarkably oppressive and straitened bureaucratic organization (McCann et al., 2020). https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/427450/1350508420975347.pdf?sequence=1 (PDF)
Managerialism is the “capitalist organization science”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management
As managerialism changes the operating paradigm from producing scientific knowledge to “scoring points”, there are long-term consequences that lead to the failure of the system. If you don’t get the importance of a paradigm shift, read Donella Meadows.
Science was political in non-capitalistic societies, as well. That’s the point of my second paragraph: science requires resources and however a society steers resources to productive uses, a scientist will need to advocate for their research in order for it to get done.
Read some Foucault for an explanation, that’s just being human. You don’t stop being human just because you follow scientific ideals. All human endeavors will follow human dynamics.
No. Science is the only human effort that specifically defines what human is. If we allow that “sure being human is going to mess up science” then we have failed before we even started.
I’m really surprised, although this is becoming kind of common so perhaps I shouldn’t be, to see all the comments saying effectively “yeah, so?”
Science doesn’t define what humans are. Humans are, then science plays catch up to try and define what that even means. Science is a human endeavor, a framework of thought, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it cannot exist without humans thinking, talking about it and doing it.
So if I ask you to define what a human is, you’re not going to draw at all from any previous scientific studies?
I doubt it. Not to get too ontological, just saying science (biology, psychology, anthropology) very much do define what human is.
Isn’t it great when the social institutions regulating people who want to do science promote people with the skills of salesmen over people with the skills for doing science.
It’s politics, not sales, even highly productive sales people struggle with the politics of moving up. I could sell hot sauce in hell, but getting my bro dawg boss to like me enough to promote me into his weird club of bro dawgs and not use me as a scape goat for his own mismanagement and incompetence is not a cross over skill from getting someone to spend $15.99 on a neck pillow with the cost of $0.17.
I’m arguably good at a lot of those things but didn’t want to persue a PhD because you can see the writing on the wall when you’re deep enough into academia. There’s a system in place and boy it can get dark and shitty in a hurry.
Yes but didn’t we all know that at some point before choosing that career? How do you get roughly 22 years into it - a PhD - and not know that academia is essentially a political rodeo and your research is going to be affected heavily by it? Didn’t anyone whisper it to you confidentially in the back of some elective?
It most definitely shouldn’t be, it’s clearly poisonous to the idea of science, but it wasn’t like a secret either. Like, it’s “not ok” that that’s the case, it’s not something we should wave away as “just human things” - it should be addressed, it should be fixed. But it wasn’t unknown.
There is no alternative if you actually want to do science and don’t have millions of dollars to buy labs and materials and instruments. Science gets done in spite of everything she is describing.
Fair, but how does someone take on that career and not know that?
I think it’s the degree of bullshit that increases gradually. To speak from experience, when you are a grad student you get a feeling like there’s corruption but overall your project seems like it’s important and making a real contribution (hopefully). You also don’t have to worry about where the money is coming from. Sometimes the grant as a whole is total bullshit but there is enough discretionary spending included that great science comes out of it. But you don’t realize this until you’re writing grants, and by then you’re maybe too deep in the game to pull out. Essentially, you end up becoming a manager once you get tenure. There is no epiphany; it’s more like a slow creep.
Okay. I dunno, for me it was expressly stated by many people.
Many people I know get into it because of their idealism and desire to change the academic system for the better. They invest into this career, year after year, because it’s always one more step until they can finally use their influence to change the system from the inside.
So they’ve agreed, as it were, to the politics, the metrics, etc that come with it. Hopefully they can in fact change it, or part of it anyway.
it should be addressed
I think that’s what she’s trying to do.
It’s definitely unknown to the vast majority of the tens of thousands of college freshmen who sign up to be STEM majors. Usually by the time they figure it out it’s already far too late to change their majors without rearranging their entire lives
Well, hopefully this will help change things then. It’s definitely not new.
Depends on the program you are in. The view from being a doctoral student to being a postdoc to being research/lecturing staff is very different. Not all advisors expose their students to the realities of higher levels of academia. And when a woman or minority is being mentored by a white man, they may not be aware of biases that can affect the student’s later career.
I mean, maybe I had a different view, but that was known to myself and the people I was in school with as early as highschool. As a part of the landscape, like, yes you can pursue a career in academia but. Publish or perish, etc.
why underline the whole thing
Probably for their own use, for whenever they’d come back to glance again the book. In fact, it might have helped them to find the page if they chose to post it to social media some time afterwards.
For a line or two, sure, but for that long I’d just mark the beginning and ned of the passage or maybe just draw a line in the margin the length of the info.
Sabine Hossenfelder has a video on this problem.
I was thinking of this video as soon as I saw the post. She’s really an interesting person.
I think this is a very interesting take, but I am curious about how the career in youtube is better than the academia as she describes it.
Obviously, the discrimination against female and writing without proper acknowledgement is absolutely unacceptable, but I have never heard about anything like this in my field.
However, I feel like youtube is likely a more competitive landscape than grant writing. I think it is very likely the administrative overhead for youtuber is more than 15%, and youtuber needs to get the interest of people completely ignorant of the subject, not just experts, plus battling the unpredictbility of youtube algorithm.
Of course, I am not trying to downplay the problem she mentioned, but I am just wondering how youtube is a better alternative career, considering her goal to do “serious and innovative science”.
And this is actually a good thing that it’s taught at Penn, as it doesn’t lie to you and say, “just get high grades and you’ll be the best in the world!”
Would have been nice if my university taught us that
I wanna do a PhD so bad I even started publishing during my undergrad But the publishing fees is too much just too much 100$ in a third world nation is a lot even after that the research is kept under a paywall, so disgusting
Woah, no one I know has ever paid a publishing fee. Where are you publishing? Anywhere that asks for money is a scam journal. Also, a PhD is fully funded by nature, so all fees for anything should come from your program.
Most well regarded journals in STEM require a publishing fee. That is not the case for the humanities and I believe social sciences, which are always free.
Oh I didn’t know, thanks. For some reason I assumed they were waived
In the off chance that I get to writing a paper, I’m just going to publish it in one of the free ones and add a license to it that prevents the money grabbing ones from using it.
If noone looks at it, it’s their loss.Problem is that would tank the citations or H score and then it would just exist for the sake of existing.
You can only win one battle.
And you have to choose what you push for.This problem wouldn’t have existed, had enough people migrated to open journals during the internet boom.
And if reviewers are not being paid anyway, they might as well start working with someone that’s not a money sink.
Of course I can’t say much in this regard, as I have never been a reviewer (probably not even qualifying), but I’d rather be associated with an organisation that focusses on giving a better service than on wringing funds and work out of all that deal with them.
I wish to immigrate and for that I need to stand out from the other applicants I assumed the easiest way would be through publications.
It was IEEE that’s one of the flagship organization in STEM
If your field is computer science or eng, publishing in one of the A ranking conferences for your field is as good as top journal publishing
Getting accepted is a nightmare
I would use accepted papers as an example, I find that usually helps
Thanks but are telling me to build over their work
Not exactly, you should do what interests you. I meant as in look at accepted papers for tips on organization, flow, how to explain your methodology and present figures etc. Really great research can suffer sometimes if no one can understand your methodology or your motivation for your experiments. But of course besides that it’s helpful if the presented work is meaningful and impactful for your field (your project advisor can help scope this)
I’ve got bad news about…pretty much every career path.
