“If the devotion scholars feel toward their work is intense and sometimes irrational, it’s because this is one of the last spaces of unalienated labor”

Speaking as a former academic, I don’t really agree with this — I think academia can make you believe wrongly that it’s a kind of “unalienated labor,” but actually the alienation runs deep, all the deeper when it’s invisible at first glance.

Yes, you don’t have to make something that is sold to customers or that fits in a JIRA ticket. But when you stop and think about it, you’re going to be doing research based on topics and paradigms that other people have largely defined (advisors, peers); you have to publish in journals that are often for profit and pay you zero; when you teach you usually don’t get paid all the tuition that your students are paying per course (the institution takes a big cut); you end up doing a lot of silly things to have a solid institutional position… TLDR, it has great moments of course, but it isn’t unalienated.

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nextos 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Besides, in many fields, lots of interesting research is now being done at industrial labs. So there's no reason to cope with the abuse the article describes so well, e.g. "[...] a celebrity scholar who enjoys seeing his advisees suffer, plays them against each other, and likes to remind them that without him, their careers are nothing".

As an Oxbridge academic, I can confidently state that lots of things done by e.g. Isomorphic Labs, GSK AI, or Altos Labs are better than the stuff we do in the exact same subfield. Furthermore, they pay better, there is less drama, the workplace is much more professional and, above everything, they don't suffer from the power imbalance that has made academia so toxic.

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jltsiren 3 days ago | parent [-]

"In the exact same subfield" is the key point. The academia is small. If a topic has enough direct monetary value to justify substantial spending in it, the industry will usually do better work. Academic research works better in topics that don't have such monetary value, at least not yet.

The academia lacks consistency, but I wouldn't characterize it as toxic. Many individual labs and departments are toxic, but the academia as a whole isn't. The same freedom that lets individual PIs pursue their own directions in their own ways also lets many of them create toxic work environments. But curtailing the toxicity is difficult without sacrificing the freedom the academia depends on.

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nextos 3 days ago | parent [-]

I don't agree curtailing toxicity would sacrifice freedom. The toxicity I was referring to translates into power abuse, bullying, data fabrication, and all the different kinds of misconduct that emerge in systems where there is no control, no filtering, and no skin in the game. Actually, I think freedom and creativity would flourish if academic misconduct was pursued more actively. I have worked at a few top departments, and academic misconduct led to extremely low efficiency and resource waste. Everyone was either fighting or demotivated. Huge multi-million projects didn't get anywhere. Some minimal guardrails are needed.

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jltsiren 3 days ago | parent [-]

If you are a PhD student or a postdoc, you are probably working in a PI's lab and often funded from their grants. It's also common that nobody else at the university understands the project well enough to replace the PI as your supervisor. That creates incentives to avoid reporting abuse and to tolerate unhealthy levels of toxicity, as the likely alternatives are switching to a new lab (and delaying your career) or leaving the academia.

	▲	nextos 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		True, there are incentives to avoid reporting abuse. I think in cases where abuse is reported, universities tend to support abusers because they are the ones who bring in grant money. Furthermore, internal control systems are not independent, and they tend to be linked to senior faculty members, who are the ones usually breaching the academic code of conduct. In many cases journals have retracted articles after evident image manipulation was discovered. University committees rarely take disciplinary action against fraudsters. In some prominent cases they have even issued statements of support. This is starting to change, albeit slowly. For example, Sweden now has a national integrity board that investigates those types of breaches, much more likely to be neutral as it is not closely linked to the investigated subjects.

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kjkjadksj 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You still have more freedom than most any job in the United States at that compensation level. Yes you have to get a grant approved, but you can literally pivot to all sorts of topics within your domain if you just make a reasonable enough proposal. You can craft a class to your own liking and teach whatever you come up with. And if you have tenure you are basically set for life and don’t have to worry about the macroeconomy. You can die in office still engaging in interesting intellectual pursuits. Ageism actually goes in your favor in academia where wisdom is celebrated unlike private sector where you look like a cost center with your paygrade and liable to retire and screw up your team at any moment.

Yes there are responsibilities but you’d be hard pressed to find a tenured professor who feels like they are really very onerous, especially considering how much they had to work their tail off in grad school, postdoc, and tenure track years with little to no ability to delegate any of that. Even as department chair, you will probably get assigned an admin assistant to manage that and you will pass that torch to a colleague before long.

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jujube3 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's important to understand that only a small percentage of academics will ever get tenure. The rest will keep toiling away on increasingly poorly paid and desperate postdocs until they finally age out and decide to take a job in industry. That job will pay less than the equivalent job for someone who never took the PhD track.

Of course, the percentage of tenured winners varies a lot by fields. It's very low in the humanities, somewhat better in CS and math, etc.

Once you get tenure, if you ever do, you will indeed have a lot of freedom, but you will also have a lot of work to do. Sure you can pass grading and other jobs off to grad students and postdocs (which you were for the last decade...) but in many fields, the need to fundraise never ends. It's sort of like funding a new startup every year with a different set of grad students.

Most people don't want to sit alone in a closet and think deep thoughts (well, ok, mathematicians do...). But if you want to do something in the real world, you'll need funding, and that means writing a LOT of grant proposals.

	▲	Calavar 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> It's important to understand that only a small percentage of academics will ever get tenure. The rest will keep toiling away on increasingly poorly paid and desperate postdocs until they finally age out and decide to take a job in industry. There's also a good chunk of people who fail to advance past the assistant professor level, which is pre-tenure at US institutions (not sure about other countries). And it's up or out, so if you're an assistant professor and you don't get tenure within a certain number of years, you lose your job.
	▲	libraryofbabel 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> The rest will keep toiling away on increasingly poorly paid and desperate postdocs until they finally age out and decide to take a job in industry. …and that’s for the fortunate disciplines, like CS, where there is actually an “industry” to go to. Let’s just say things look rather less pleasant in the humanities.

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Belopolye 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My grandfather was tenured, published voraciously up until he retired at 73, and was sorely disappointed when I chose not to follow in his footsteps and go into academia. Why? Primarily because I had to hear him gripe about how poorly the school administration treated him and his colleagues, culminating in him having to sue the university several times for the same reasons (and him winning every time in arbitration- he basically tripled his retirement savings).

I have a lot of respect for academics, but the culture around the administration of higher learning is putrid.

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3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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Nasrudith 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Unalienated labor doesn't exist. It is one of many fairy tales leftists like to tell themselves, like the idea of an objective fair universal price. The tale promises that work wouldn't be laborious and draining if it wasn't for those damn capitalists they would all labor happily in some kind of utopia. It would be comical except people actually believe it. Notice their ears remain firmly plugged to testimonies of life as a worker under communism which would tell them their framework is fatally flawed.

Of course, operating under such ideological blinkers it is no wonder why so many leftist grad students toil for the promised land. Others merely do the same for believed good hours and prestiege with no such delusions.