That just what being a member of society is, lots of overhead.
Autistic people often face these challenges even outside of science.
Yeah, while I can relate to her plight, its pretty much the same situation when you do research in the industry and you want to get ahead in your career. Some things are different, but politics are still politics.
politics are still politics.
Whenever you have more than one person at a time in an environment, you have politics of some form or another.
People who proclaim how much interpersonal politics bothers them will have a much harder time getting ahead because you don’t get out of the political game unless you’re willing to compromise on a lot of things we work for.
But it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing game, just getting a LITTLE more comfortable talking and socializing can have massive benefits to your professional life.
Completely ignoring qualification altogether in favor of nepotistic back scratching is actually not just being a member of society. IMO, HR should hide the identifying information of candidates from people making the hiring decisions so all they’ve got is the qualifications on the resume to judge them by.
IMO, HR should hide the identifying information of candidates from people making the hiring decisions
That would shift towards another metric of whose resumes look the best. That might be an improvement, but we’d still be talking about how much bullshit there is in making your resume perfectly tailored to a particular opportunity. And at that point we’re still talking about the skills that go into a grant application or a submission of a paper to a conference. That’s the soft skills that make science possible, even if submissions are anonymized.
That’s just not how the world works though… you will have to work with at least 1 person at a job (your boss), so you should be able to work well with at least 1 person. That doesn’t come through with just a resume.
You’re getting downvoted because a large number of people who spend their weekdays voting on internet comments are not working.
Working is easy. Maintaining a predictable and comfortable work environment for a team of people also trying to get through their day while meeting larger goals for the company is very, very hard. The interview process is where the actual decisions are made by managers like myself, because I am responsible for a dozen people’s lives and workdays, I have to make sure anyone I add to their daily necessary interactions isn’t going to be a massive piece of shit who will disrupt everything.
I will always choose lower qualified people with better attitudes than people with sparkling resumes who seem “off” or like they’re going to be a problem.
I fully expect to also get reamed in the voting process here, but if you feel the need to attack this basic fact of life that the needs of the existing and working team outweigh your unique personality and identity, you’re exactly the kind of person I screen out at hiring interviews.
I appreciate the sentiment but no - in the case of hard science it shouldn’t be.
Yes, BS exists everywhere, yes we all have to do it, yes yes yes but this is science. Only facts should matter, only agreed truth should be the topic the rest of it is very obviously poisoning the entirety of the effort to understand our world.
Saying “so what we all have to deal with it” is not the point. If you’re talking about seminary, that’s maybe closer(?) to the gist than, say, marketing. Or if you’re a systems analyst for the USPS it’s similar maybe. But people out in the world doing non-scientific things have already agreed long ago that it doesn’t really matter what they find or how they find it (so long as it leads to more money, the only source of “truth”) - science does not.
All the bullshit and pointless politics and ladders and so on she’s talking about in the quote are just ways to say “money” (or “power”) for science which is an anathema.
And in the social sciences, we’re really fucked.
Only facts should matter, only agreed truth should be the topic the rest of it is very obviously poisoning the entirety of the effort to understand our world.
I don’t understand how you’d prioritize things using only facts, and not some kind of extrinsic value system that assigns weights to those facts.
Let’s say you have a huge infrared telescope sitting at a Lagrange point, between the earth and the sun. How would you determine what it should be observing at any given time? There’s only 8760 hours in a year, and the telescope was designed to last for 5 years, with the hope of 10 years. How do you divide up that finite resource?
Now do the same for every particle collider, double blind medical study, paleontological excavation, test nuclear reactor, etc., fighting for a finite amount of science money, and you’ll have no choice but to define priorities according to projections and uncertainties and value judgments.
Seeing this, it applies everywhere including something as trivial as a retail job. I wonder if that’s why I too dislike that sort of backroom politicking so much.
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
I choose you, Shyentist!
Shyentist used Facts and Data
…
It’s not very effective.
… He confused himself
But also the customers
???
Profit
Bloviator uses “lie!”
“We’ll be 100% self driving in a year!”
It was very effective!
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.
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?
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.
It’s funny you use Woz and Jobs as an example when Jobs regularly emotionally manipulated and abused his employees and stole Woz’s money.
I wonder why schmoozers have a bad rep 🤔
Jobs was an asshole.
Also, he got shit done. He wasn’t a technical genius, but he and the team he built could pitch the shit out of products. Apple’s value has rarely been in its technical superiority, but in branding.
“Asshole” is the word for a guy who likes to cut people off in traffic. I think there’s probably a more appropriate word for someone who emotionally manipulates you over the course of years so you’re continually a nervous wreck and can be destroyed any time it’s convenient for him. Seriously if you haven’t watched the interview I linked at least look at the first couple of minutes.
And at the end of the day, who did this behavior actually benefit? Steve helped make Apple a lot of money, sure, but where did most of that money go? It didn’t go to the employees he abused, that’s for sure. But maybe Apple products ended up benefitting society as a whole, and without Steve we wouldn’t have had that? Well you already said that more often than not Apple’s success didn’t have anything to do with technical superiority.
The fact that people like this (Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc) often head successful companies isn’t an example of how beneficial they are, it’s an example of how broken our system is.
It shows how important having a charismatic person is to make any venture a success. We’re all humans with limited time on the earth. We can’t possibly experience everything. All we see and do is filtered out of necessity. A charismatic advocate of a product/movement/idea can get people to pay attention.
The best musician in history is probably unknown because they didn’t have a good manager/agent.
The greatest painting ever made was probably thrown away because nobody ever knew about it.
Hype men are necessary.
ok, everyone has hype men now. Everyone is charismatic now. Now what, will the greatest be found? We’re just back to square one.
In my personal experience I’ve had to go out of my way to find every quality product I’ve ever purchased, from dishwasher detergent to heat pumps, and none of them were the ones with the highest advertising budgets. You’re right that we all have limited time and can’t possibly evaluate every single thing that exists, but hype men don’t help with that. The professional liars and manipulators that work in advertising only add to the noise and make it take longer to arrive at a conclusion. For example the fact that there are the 12 different brands of space heaters that come in different sizes and shapes and at different price points despite all performing the exact same way. It’s like that with literally everything, from bar soap, to maple syrup, to sunscreen.
I think this way because I am autistic. I honestly cannot imagine feeling the need for hype men. The phrase “you need hype men” sounds to me like “you need your abuser, you cannot live without them”.
Something like 35% of autistic people attempt suicide because of what the original post describes (and not just in science, but in every aspect of the world). And yeah, I think if I had to work for someone like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk I would as well.
Isn’t this true for all jobs? Specially corporate jobs? It’s still horrible, but that’s capitalism for you.
I’m sorry, but this has nothing to do with capitalism. If we were under a king, you’d still have to schmooze the king. Socialism may give you money to feed yourself, but it won’t pay you to do science. An economic system doesn’t prevent you from needing interpersonal skills.
Socialism wouldn’t pay you to do science, but it would give you a universal basic income, so you could do science without needing to be paid if you wanted
Speaking as a Socialist, no, lmao.
First off, UBI’s are not Socialism. In fact, they are antithetical to Socialism. They are Social Democracy, which is objectively the moderate wing of Fascism, the standard borne by those who think we can make a better society by instituting ranked-choice voting, net neutrality, and a 32-hour workweek without ever looking past the symptoms into the actual problems inherent in the system.
Under Socialism, the vast, vast majority of science will be done (as it is/was, in the USSR and China) by government or government-funded research organizations, where materials are supplied to them and their research is guided by the public interest.
Cranks doing “science” in their garages and basements in their spare time will still just be cranks.
These scientists aren’t schmoozing for a paycheck. Research is expensive. They’re getting funding for equipment and personnel.
Across the board, we have let people who are primarily motivated by accumulating wealth and power accumulate wealth and power unchecked, and then make all the rules for how everything around them works.
These are the last people you want making the rules if you desire sane and sustainable social environments.
The best thing we could collectively do for ourselves is strip and block these kinds of people from positions of authority on the sheer basis that they seek it so eagerly, tell them to their faces WHY, tell them they can’t have it back and that they can ONLY have it back when they stop wanting it so badly, no matter HOW HARD they cry about it and then treat them with the same kind of disdain they’ve treated people who don’t want to play by THEIR rules for centuries.
The same problem exists in socialism
You need to convince people what you’re doing is worth doing. Whether that is economically or societally
It absolutely is like this in every corporate setting.
The key difference here is that if you don’t play the game at TechCo Incorporated and spend the next ten years just entering data and being passed over, people will say “That’s corporate life for you” and give you support and sympathy.
If you don’t play the game in your academic field then you’re “wasting enough money to buy a house” and that tends to raise people’s ire or at least interest. It brings to mind all kinds of negative stereotypes in your own mind and makes you ashamed to be someone who doesn’t want to play the social game.
I’ve got bad news about…pretty much every career path.
Yeah, it’s an important skill to both be able to communicate your achievements and to be able to interpret achievements of others correctly (i.e. be able to see through their bs) in any job setting.
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.
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 problem is not that one has to communicate the significance of research. However since the people with money don’t understand the science, they can easily be mislead. And there are also big trends when it comes to funding so you can participate in the buzzword olympics to secure your funding. And this is where you leave the path of just communicating your research and its potential honestly.
The second point where this Nobel prize winner is very right is that it’s all about networking, all about names. I don’t know why we can’t just publish research under a pseudonym, a number would suffice. This would make publishing and reviewing less susceptible to bias.
Same reason why we name amps and volts after Ampere and Volta. It’s about recognition and legacy. Imagine you discover some new form of matter, a specialized region of the brain, a key component of time travel, or some algorithm that accurately describes any human interaction. Something revolutionary. Would you be content if it wasn’t named for you? Ormr Matter, Ormr’s Area, Ormr’s Theory of Inverse Relativity, Ormr’s Equation for Social Simulation. This is really just the extreme case, but I think it works well to demonstrate the point.
Would you be content if it wasn’t named for you?
Yes. I recognize that most people don’t think this way, though.
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 :)
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.
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.
Unfortunately, it’s for the best. If you’re serious about research you have to present yourself. Especially if you’re the first person to discover it, you’re the most - possibly only - qualified person to talk about that thing.
Part of scientific communication is giving elevator talks. You have to be able to argue for funding.
Not to mention, if you never develop those skills, you’re just opening yourself up to getting a worse financial incentive for the same amount of 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!”
that’s how it workes everywhere
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These are just people skills. Of course you’re gonna have to make people like you if you want to work with people. Half the brain is dedicated to networking with other brains.
And it’s not actually that hard to agreeably disagree with someone. You say your thing, and then you do your little song and dance to make sure they know you respect them, and you go on your way.
A little bit of humility goes a long way. Hard scientists aren’t above a little compassion, a little bit of care for explaining themselves to the public and to money movers.
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.
Do you not write the publishing fees into your grant proposals? And the paywall is just to access through the journal, you can generally just email the author and they will send you a PDF of the work - because the whole point is for the work to be known about and referenced in more work, which can only be done if it’s read. The work being in the journal means that it’s been peer-reviewed and is scientifically rigorous (which is part of what the fee covers)
Mostly I have a problem with it being paywalled, I paid for it to be peer reviewed why they get to make money off it. Also peer reviewers are not compensated either
The reviewers are not compensated, but the editorial staff that maintain the journal are (part of which is recruiting and maintaining a reviewing board, soliciting comments, sending articles for review/rewrite, etc), as well as the staff that organize and put together the conferences that each journal hosts, and all other aspects of maintaining a journal such as partnerships with libraries and schools, memberships lists, etc. Did you think the fee only covered the Internet hosting?
Arxive or techarxive is doing it for free
Except those are for pre-print and post-print and don’t offer peer review
for the hosting and all
They charge enough to pay for their staff why can’t just make it open access
The resources you mentioned are hosted through Cornell by volunteers (who have other full time jobs), presumably Cornell has a rigorous in-house hosting system. And this is only for receiving the articles submitted to them that are pre- and post-print, they do not solicit articles or comments, nor do they have management of any journal publications or events.
I truly do not think you are grasping the enormity of the tasks required to run a journal. It is not simply forwarding the article to peer reviewers and then hosting it. There are legal aspects that go along with managing a journal, recruiting a review board for each article (making sure they are experts in the field, not just random reviewers), getting comments on each article, maintaining a job board for a student chapter, hosting events, hosting annual or biannual conferences, and so many more things. Each article doesn’t just get put up online, it literally needs to be PUBLISHED which comes with it’s own aspects, isbn numbers, doi number, fees, etc.
The paywall includes paying for the specific article, or becoming a member of the journal. Being member of the journal unlocks ALL articles in the journal (which didn’t used to be the case prior to digital editions. I still have my physical journals editions of many journals I’m a member of because it used to be you only had access to the articles from the years you were actually a member and were sent the physical copies). Many people that publish will be members of the journal which lowers the cost to submit articles significantly, while also giving them access to the articles published. Additionally, instead of looking solely at the journal for the article, most people know to look at the source of the research for the PDF (ie, look for the author’s university site or personal page to look for a link to a PDF) because generally whoever paid for the research wants the research to be available to be read, especially if it was paid for by taxpayers. And STILL if you find an article that you don’t have access to, and your university is not a member to the journal or local library is not a member and neither can do an interlibrary loan for it, you can STILL simply email the author and ask if they can send it to you and chances are they will be more than willing.
So I’m still not entirely sure what the issue is, except an incredibly immature and naive desire to complain about information not being open access because grr I’ve been told all capitalism is bad, so I must apply it to everything because I don’t know how to actually look for information and don’t know how to think for myself grrr.
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.
I’m trying to imagine a job where being a disagreeable antisocial recluse is an advantage and I’m coming up blank.
Owner of Twitter?
So… truck driver or IT?
My cousin works (sometimes) as a truck driver. He’s certified for any size truck, flammable/biohazardous goods, the lot. He’d be making good money if he could stop telling his bosses to fuck off.
I was in IT for 20 years. In order to succeed, I had to become 50% therapist.
Am currently in IT, can confirm.
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”
👍
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.
Sadly not just the USA.
Sadly not just science, either.
