As a mid-90s Westinghouse winner weird nerd who never ended up in academia because of a desire to be left alone to do my research thing this hits hard:<p>"Biology Professor Jason Sheltzer has an interesting thread today that points in this direction. Through an ad hoc analysis, Jason discovered that while 66% of the top national winners at the Intel/Westinghouse Science Fair from 1990 to 2002 pursued careers in academia, this number dropped to less than a third for winners from 2003 to 2014. Now, for this to support my and Nate’s observations, you have to assume the Science Fair winners are good representations of the Weird Nerd. I personally think that’s a valid assumption! If you scroll down in his thread, you will see indeed some illustrious names of current academics among these winners. I’ll add to this list recent Nobel Laureate Katalin Kariko, who describes in her book having scored 3rd in her country in the Biology Olympiad. This is the closest thing Eastern European countries have to a Science Fair."<p>* Finalist but not top 10 which is what the data here was about.
I’m not convinced by this proposed dichotomy: I know plenty of “Weird Nerd”-type academics who are also ruthless bureaucrats, proficient in leveraging their Boy Genius status to bully, belittle, and generally undermine the academic system whenever it doesn’t directly advance their interests.<p>Just about every I know with a higher STEM degree has a personal story about one of these types. A professional administrator with no interest in “real” academia is its own kind of ill, but it’s not clear to me that things were all that rosy to begin with.
This has been written about in various ways in the academic and surrounding literature for awhile now. I'm not sure the language it uses does itself any favors but it does point to some interesting recent discussion and research.<p>A lot of it is a stick as well as carrot problem; a lot of the incentive structures are basically pushing and rewarding management and administrative — as well as salesmanship — behavior rather than research per se. If you want to do research, you're going to find modern academics increasingly distasteful. If there are alternative career paths for you, it's just another thing pulling you in a different direction.<p>The article gets into this with the discussion of the converse — the entry of failed corporatists, which is an interesting twist — but I'm not sure the exit of certain content-focused individuals per se is really the original cause. It might create a vicious circle or feedback loop but I think there's origins and sustaining factors elsewhere.
I suspect this comment under TFA is closer to what’s going on: “My sense is that winning Westinghouse has slanted substantially toward the types who just want to overachieve and go to Harvard relative to the types who are weird nerds even apart from any differences between subjects.” Access to the professional mentoring and resources needed for kids to do projects at the currently-competitive levels has literally been commodified. This underlying population change then explains why they don’t go into science careers.
*<p>1 point by sophyphreak 0 minutes ago | next | edit | delete [–]<p>It always fascinates me how much people bend over backwards to create euphemisms for "Autistic people" or, in this case, "high IQ, STEM-focused, Autistic people." Even "people with Autistic traits" would be fine. A large part of me thinks we would be better off to be specific, and another large part of me thinks this pattern reinforces stereotype of Autistic incompetence. (Stereotype of Autistic incompetence: <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8813809/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8813809/</a>)
I don't think the "weird nerd" who is obsessed with the truth ever existed.<p>Is the lamentation that academics today are less objective, and presumably the tech and finance workers would have been more objective? I don't think the tech and finance people would have been academics in the precise areas of research that are suffering from an objectivity/truth crisis. Certainly it's not computer engineering that everyone is lamenting about.<p>As for the supposed objectivity of the "weird nerd", I don't know what to say. I have met more conspiracy theorists in my interactions with "weird nerds" than in my everyday interactions with normal people.
I work both in an R&D group at a company and at the university and it's like night and day. At the company, if we need something to do the job it is simply purchased. At the university I had long meetings about whether or not I was allowed to spend 8 euros of my own grant money on VAT. In the company, if a project is under budget, good news! we can spend it on something else. At the university I was told to spend money before end of year on a software development project otherwise there may be budget issues. Moreover, the university provides very little reward for success unless you have a tenure track position.<p>What is the reward for publishing papers, getting grants, or doing other things that provide direct benefit to the university? Well nothing except perhaps the continuation of your job. This isn't even guaranteed even if you can pay for yourself with grants. There is a case I know of recently of a researcher with a non-permanent position and plenty of ERC money who was fired. Why? The state ruled that he had been in his non-permanent position for too long and the university didn't have any deaths recently so there were no open positions for him.<p>Ultimately, you have to ask yourself, what is the entire goal of academic research? Write more papers? The enshitification of academia has been the introduction of metrics, the expansion of the administration, the archaic phd-postdoc-tenure-track pipeline which simply ignores in many cases that a project may need more than one super star, perhaps they need a good team with different skills that work together. From my understanding, Edward Lorenz did not publish a paper for more than 5 years while he worked on his atmospheric circulation problem. This led to the entire field of chaos. Can you imagine a research scientist today simply rejecting writing papers, advising phds and master students, simply because he had things he was interested in doing?<p>There is a constant pulling away from your curiosity towards whatever it is you think you will be evaluated on. And it is insidious. It typically doesn't come directly from your supervisor. It is simply the environment you find yourself surrounded in. Academic societies give awards and cite the number of papers an awardee has published in recent years. You think, perhaps i should publish more? Your colleague gets a grant and their contract is extended several years because they now have money to pay for themselves. So you think, i should apply for another grant. You see people organizing sessions, workshops, special issues, etc. They become "known". You think, perhaps I should organize a session or a special issue. Perhaps this is all my inability to keep myself focused on a singular task and push my projects forward. But I don't seem to be the only one with this experience. There is always another Nature/Science/whatever op-ed on the plight of the post-PhD, non-permanent scientific staff.<p>Don't get me wrong, I don't hate my job. I love my job. I just wish I could find the singular focus that would drive me to complete more research instead of writing long essays on hacker news.
Academia has become a prestige obsessed pissing contest. You need to go to a presitigous university for undergrad, so you can find a PhD position under a famous professor at another prestigious university who has lots of connections to the editorial teams of top tier journals, so you can publish at the prestigious journals, so that when you finish the PhD you can do 1-2 (or 5, or 10...) postdocs with other famous professors, so that by the time you compete for tenure track positions you use the connections with famous professors and publications at prestigious journals to become a professor yourself. Once you make it to professor, you need to use the connections and the prestige to get the big grants to hire lots of PhDs and postdocs yourself to continue the cycle.<p>If at any point you prioritise your drive and passion for a subject over the prestige and connections game, the peers who play the game will get far ahead of you in their careers, and you won't make it to professor. Saw too many 38+ year old postdocs who thought quietly pursuing their passion in their subject would get them anywhere.<p>No wonder all the people who just wanted to do their damn research went into industry. I did it myself and now get paid more than all of my former supervisor's postdocs combined. I don't think this even has to do with being a 'weird nerd'. Basically, at least in STEM, you have to specifically WANT to play the silly prestige pissing contest to stay in academia. Otherwise, forces of nature (economic and social), naturally push you out of academia.