"Don't Become a Scientist!"

This is an article I came across elsewhere in the forum. It's about early academic career, one of unsecure, unstable, and underpaid. Worse, reresearch budget cuts are coming. Even worse, there are traditionally fewer vacancies in social sciences than science.

-----------------------------------------
Don't Become a Scientist!
Jonathan I. Katz
Professor of Physics
Washington University, St. Louis, Mo.


Are you thinking of becoming a scientist? Do you want to uncover themysteries of nature, perform experiments or carry out calculations to learnhow the world works? Forget it!


Science is fun and exciting. The thrill of discovery is unique. If you aresmart, ambitious and hard working you should major in science as anundergraduate. But that is as far as you should take it. After graduation,you will have to deal with the real world. That means that you should noteven consider going to graduate school in science. Do something elseinstead: medical school, law school, computers or engineering, or somethingelse which appeals to you.


Why am I (a tenured professor of physics) trying to discourage you fromfollowing a career path which was successful for me? Because times havechanged (I received my Ph.D. in 1973, and tenure in 1976). American scienceno longer offers a reasonable career path. If you go to graduate school inscience it is in the expectation of spending your working life doingscientific research, using your ingenuity and curiosity to solve importantand interesting problems. You will almost certainly be disappointed,probably when it is too late to choose another career.

American universities train roughly twice as many Ph.D.s as there are jobsfor them. When something, or someone, is a glut on the market, the pricedrops. In the case of Ph.D. scientists, the reduction in price takes theform of many years spent in ``holding pattern'' postdoctoral jobs.Permanent jobs don't pay much less than they used to, but instead of obtaininga real job two years after the Ph.D. (as was typical 25 years ago) mostyoung scientists spend five, ten, or more years as postdocs. They have noprospect of permanent employment and often must obtain a new postdoctoralposition and move every two years. For many more details consult the YoungScientists' Network or read the account in the May, 2001 issue of theWashington Monthly.

As examples, consider two of the leading candidates for a recent AssistantProfessorship in my department. One was 37, ten years out of graduateschool (he didn't get the job). The leading candidate, whom everyone thinksis brilliant, was 35, seven years out of graduate school. Only then was heoffered his first permanent job (that's not tenure, just the possibility ofit six years later, and a step off the treadmill of looking for a new jobevery two years). The latest example is a 39 year old candidate for anotherAssistant Professorship; he has published 35 papers. In contrast, a doctortypically enters private practice at 29, a lawyer at 25 and makes partner at31, and a computer scientist with a Ph.D. has a very good job at 27(computer science and engineering are the few fields in which industrialdemand makes it sensible to get a Ph.D.). Anyone with the intelligence,ambition and willingness to work hard to succeed in science can also succeedin any of these other professions.

Typical postdoctoral salaries begin at $27,000 annually in the biologicalsciences and about $35,000 in the physical sciences (graduate studentstipends are less than half these figures). Can you support a family onthat income? It suffices for a young couple in a small apartment, though I know of one physicist whose wife left him because she was tired of repeatedly moving with little prospect of settling down. When you are in your thirties you will need more: a house in a good school district andall the other necessities of ordinary middle class life. Science is a profession, not a religious vocation, and does not justify an oath of poverty or celibacy.

Of course, you don't go into science to get rich. So you choose not to goto medical or law school, even though a doctor or lawyer typically earns twoto three times as much as a scientist (one lucky enough to have a goodsenior-level job). I made that choice too. I became a scientist in orderto have the freedom to work on problems which interest me. But you probablywon't get that freedom. As a postdoc you will work on someone else's ideas,and may be treated as a technician rather than as an independentcollaborator. Eventually, you will probably be squeezed out of scienceentirely. You can get a fine job as a computer programmer, but why not dothis at 22, rather than putting up with a decade of misery in the scientificjob market first? The longer you spend in science the harder you will find it to leave, and the less attractive you will be to prospective employers inother fields.
Perhaps you are so talented that you can beat the postdoc trap; someuniversity (there are hardly any industrial jobs in the physical sciences)will be so impressed with you that you will be hired into a tenure track position two years out of graduate school. Maybe. But the general cheapening of scientific labor means that even the most talented stay on the postdoctoral treadmill for a very long time; consider the job candidates described above. And many who appear to be very talented, with grades and recommendations to match, later find that the competition of research is more difficult, or at least different, and that they must struggle with the rest.

Suppose you do eventually obtain a permanent job, perhaps a tenured professorship. The struggle for a job is now replaced by a struggle for grant support, and again there is a glut of scientists. Now you spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because yourproposals are judged by your competitors you cannot follow your curiosity,but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflectingcriticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems.They're not the same thing: you cannot put your past successes in aproposal, because they are finished work, and your new ideas, howeveroriginal and clever, are still unproven. It is proverbial that originalideas are the kiss of death for a proposal; because they have not yet beenproved to work (after all, that is what you are proposing to do) they canbe, and will be, rated poorly. Having achieved the promised land, you findthat it is not what you wanted after all.

What can be done? The first thing for any young person (which means anyonewho does not have a permanent job in science) to do is to pursue anothercareer. This will spare you the misery of disappointed expectations.Young Americans have generally woken up to the bad prospects and absence ofa reasonable middle class career path in science and are deserting it.If you haven't yet, then join them. Leave graduate school to people fromIndia and China, for whom the prospects at home are even worse. I haveknown more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physicsthan by drugs.

If you are in a position of leadership in science then you should try topersuade the funding agencies to train fewer Ph.D.s. The glut of scientistsis entirely the consequence of funding policies (almost all graduateeducation is paid for by federal grants). The funding agencies arebemoaning the scarcity of young people interested in science when theythemselves caused this scarcity by destroying science as a career. Theycould reverse this situation by matching the number trained to the demand,but they refuse to do so, or even to discuss the problem seriously (for manyyears the NSF propagated a dishonest prediction of a coming shortage ofscientists, and most funding agencies still act as if this were true). Theresult is that the best young people, who should go into science, sensiblyrefuse to do so, and the graduate schools are filled with weak Americanstudents and with foreigners lured by the American student visa.


Source is here:

http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html

Read two theoretical writings

本來這個月是用來閉關苦讀，可以種種事情令我不能集中，總覺得不在狀態

不過，在過去的三個星期也能夠把兩本對我的工作比較重要著作看過大半，我的目的很明確：在開始研究之前要先把其理論脈絡用清楚，不然無法知道所得的結果在學術上有何意義，更無法從根本地解答當前問題。


第一本是John O'Neill 的"Market, Deliberation and Environment" (Routledge, 2007)
雖然這本書的內容都十分有趣而且重要，但大都已經被其他人及作者自己在其他articles討論過，這本書似乎是作者自己的論文總結，沒什麼創新觀點。主要是圍繞經濟價值的謬誤，及deliberative democracy的優劣。當中有一點是值得深思，有些人 - 包括Clive和我 - 都主張用deliberative institution去articulate 環境價值，即是透過半公開、實驗形式的小組討論去為某一環境物品定價，然而O'Neill卻似乎反對一切定價行為，他所提出的論據不無道理，例如很多公共財產都有道德價值，根本不適宜被冠上幣值。但我在想是不是一定是all or nothing，到底問題是出在幣值本身，還是它背後理論假設及運作模式? 是否可以將後二者來點改變，然後重新定義環境價值(monetary)? 有沒有中間路線呢?



第二本是我supervisor，另一位John，John Dryzek的"Discursive Democract" (Cambridge, 1990)
此書為該領域的奠基著作之一，它提出了一套新的民主理論，此一理論即為上文提及的deliberative institution 的基礎。大意是公共決策該由collective, public communication而始，而非individualistic, aggregative voting，再簡單點說就是talk before vote，視public dialogue為最主要的決策原素，而非次於majority voting。另一個重要觀點是(inter)subjectivism取代objectivism，就是說在政策層面上，科學化、重結果的reasoning不應被用作處理公共資源的絕對準則，這兩者都或多或多了假設了某種特定的價值觀，例如經濟學裡的『效率』，取而代之的是communicative rationality，其主要主張為: the only authority is better arguments (not material gains)。這套理論最大優點是容納多元價值，但我仍是沒法從中找到適當的理論途徑去解讀從deliberative institution所產生的monetary value，即是以group的形式、經過商議及專家討論後所同意的willingness-to-pay是代表著什麼? (WTP in market is price, which is easy to understand)。另外deliberative institution又是否exclusive of strategic reasoning? 但別忘記有時候strategic reasoning也是多元價值的表達形式之一。

在我的研究領域內，提出、測試及解釋可容納多元價值的制度是一個新方向，但多元價值卻與傳統經濟系統合不來，要經濟利益老是屈於其他價值之下也不合民主原則，且是難於實行，用一套independent-of-all的approach i.e. communicative rationalization似乎比較合理，但如何可以做到? 如何解讀?

Neverheless, I can see there is one possible way to interpret. It stems from the theory of communicative action by Jurgen Habermas, the leading philosophy in 20th century (from which Dryzek and others developed the idea of deliberative democracy). Communicative rationality is that it is tied to subject-subject relation between interacting individuals, rather than subject-object relation between monologically acting individuals presumed by instrument rationality underpinning economics. So, value from deliberative institutions should be understood as a matter of intersubjectivity, not exclusively objectivity nor subjectivity. It is the interaction among people as a group that forms the value, not isolated individuals; not uncontested economic nor ethical interests, but the interplay between them.