Capitalism’s perversion on display: incentivizing the wrong thing in every case.
Mary E. Brunkow, one of this year's Nobel Prize winners in Medicine, has only 34 published papers and an H-index of 21.
Submitted 2 weeks ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/8d13cc35-81fa-4e25-846b-2a418249918f.jpeg
Comments
ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
Gloomy@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
I sometimes see videos of Hossenfelder on my feed and have watched a couple. Would you mind adding some context? What are “anti-science grifters”? Sry if i’m a bit out of the loop here.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
There’s probably more to it but at minimum she loves to opine on things she has no expertise on and gets things very wrong as a result. Often things that aren’t even science related.
sleeperdouge@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Angela Collier on YT has some good videos about these. I think those videos talks about conspiracy and science crackpots.
crmsnbleyd@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
As someone outside of academia, seeing the phrase only 34 papers feels like being shot in the face
Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Honestly if I see someone who publishes like 200+ papers I would just be wondering… What the hell did they contribute? They’re churning shit out the door so either they weren’t involved much and did the bare minimum to put their name on the paper or it was mostly inconsequential and non-impressive shit that you could churn out in a few weeks.
skisnow@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
There’s a guy at IBM who has thousands of patents with his name on.
He works in the department that helps people write patents.
Eq0@literature.cafe 2 weeks ago
It really depends on the field. I will talk about fields I know: fundamental math - one paper every 2-3 years is a good pace, every paper 50-100 pages. AI - a paper a month is the usual, with a hard cap at 10 pages, often less.
Danitos@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
They could also be directing thesis. They’ll appear in their students papers on the topic. My professor was incresibly useful in mine, and I know he does this a lot.
mariusafa@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
Science ranking is one more bullshit to deal nowadays. Like if the discovery of something new in a fiels ia going to care about how many medals you have hanging from your suit.
This is literally the bullshit that science magazines and publication entities love the most.
Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Don’t worry, that system is currently being completely fucked by AI as well.
whyrat@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If quantity is the measure instead of quality: AI wins!
Repurposed joke: It’s able to make more mistakes faster than any other invention… with the possible exception of tequila and handguns.
tetris11@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
I have a high school friend who owns a paper mill. He was a rich kid who never did the work, and always took credit for others work.
He has an h-index of 90 and 200,000 citations. He is not a professor.
wewbull@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
A paper mill will produce a lot of papers.
errer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I am not following…how does he have so many papers with a high number of citations if he is not a professor? Just an extremely prolific postdoc/person on soft money?
rf_@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
He owns a paper mill, he games the system
guy@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
There’s rankings for scientists?
cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
There absolutely is. Academia is completely fucked.
asbestos@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They should just join the unranked servers
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
yeah, not like Wall Street, government or industry.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Shut up, #16,793.
balsoft@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Yes, and if you fall down far enough you won’t get any grants to do any research, and “forced” to go back to teaching/mentoring. Both of those things tell a lot about the state of high-level education and academia in the west.
pdxfed@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The analytics are overblown, and coaches need to get back to the big picture. Stanford traded Hollins at the deadline for Wu, but picked up the player option on Candell for the 4th year. The performance bonus if they make the all-star team should provide enough motivation to ensure they don’t get saddled with a mid-career ball hog. Team chemistry will be key, hopefully during the preseason they can get it together and not have any niggling injuries interrupt. There is concern about the defensive strategy on set plays, their specialist Franco just had their contract waived and stretched under the current contract, so the team may look to the transfer market mid season when it opens, or potentially to move up in the spring draft to fill needs. Still can’t believe they traded Simpson and pay 2.7 per year for Johnson.
Universities run by MBAs and academics operating like sports franchises.Meanwhile, they’re arresting students in campus for protesting genocide and fascism.
Seems legit.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
yea, if you see how hard is it to get a faculty position you will see.
hakase@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I mean sure, as long as I don’t care about getting tenure or finding a permanent position…
Jhex@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The idea is that if you focus on the work, all of that would/should follow…
I have read a few anecdotes from scholars basically confirming this: they were doing “everything right” and getting nowhere but the moment they decided to just do the work that makes them happy, all the titles and positions followed.
I believe Patricia Ryan Madson is one such story although not in a scientific branch. IIRC, she could not get permanent positions in any university even though she had a “perfect resume” but then decided to follow her passion and her career just took off.
I know this is idealistic, but I still wish this were how the world works
JesusChristLover420@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
I sure hope this is how it works, because I haven’t been blessed with the patience to care about any of that. I want to solve mysteries.
zlatiah@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Important additional context on this… TLDR is that the post is only a “feel-good” post and misrepresented reality; real life is a lot more nuanced and fucked up
Mary E Brunkow solely worked in industry (a.k.a. the scientific slang for working in something like a pharmaceuticals cpmpany) after her PhD, instead of in academia like most Nobel Prize laureates. Industry researchers rarely publish. And 34 published papers may seem low by Nobel standards but is a lot. I don’t think I personally know any industry researchers that are this prolific; some full professors even don’t have this many papers
The bigger takeaway from this story is not “anyone can make it” if they have a good idea… Brunkow was extremely prolific as a researcher. If anything, her old company (Celltech) went defunct in 2004 and Brunkow was allegedly laid off (and no one at the time realized the importance of her discovery) which is probably a better take home message
Her Wikipedia page as reference: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_E._Brunkow
TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Also some discussion about this on r/labrats if anyone wants to go over to the forbidden site:
I went. It was a mistake. Most comments were about how this post was written by ChatGPT followby how they’d love to have 34 publications. There were a couple taking about what you wrote, but I think your comment captures the best of it.
jve@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Hah wow. Thanks for putting that into context.
SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
*But also do it in your free time after your real job and do it for free
It really is amazing any non-corporate research ever gets this far.
Vex_Detrause@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Mary Elizabeth Brunkow (born 1961) is an American molecular biologist and immunologist. She is known for co-identifying the gene later named FOXP3 as the cause of the scurfy mouse phenotype, a finding that became foundational for modern regulatory T cell biology.
olafurp@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Thanks for posting the comment I was looking for
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
And, before the prize fame, was she able to afford a comfortable home and a family without clout chasing?
CptOblivius@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Quality over quantity.
NuraShiny@hexbear.net 2 weeks ago
Okay. Take your own advice and stop posting. Focus on what’s important and shut the fuck up.
Directed at the lib who in the picture of course. No one on this site should ever stop posting.
ThermonuclearEgg@hexbear.net 2 weeks ago
No one on this site should ever stop posting.
The reason for this is that posting on Hexbear is the second most important thing in all of existence
Lussy@hexbear.net 2 weeks ago
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
alot of phds are just making paper after paper which could be considered low quality, just to have thier CV presentable.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I think we also need to be careful about what we consider low-quality clones of other work.
Reproduction of research is extremely important. It isn’t glamorous, but it’s how we verify shit.
jve@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yes—academic publishing has become a quantity engine—endlessly churning out papers that echo one another—more about survival than discovery. Many PhDs write for the CV, not the cosmos—speculating, recycling, or rephrasing ideas to stay afloat in the “publish or perish” tide—where innovation drowns quietly beneath the noise. /gpt
Imagine how much worse it’s going to get as more and more is ai slop like the above.
LordOfLocksley@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What’s an H-index
fossilesque@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
It basically measures how old a scientist is.
TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
…did you remove the default upvote from your own question? Before I upvoted it, it had 0 upvotes and 0 downvotes.
Gloomy@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
A rare true neutral one out in the wild.
Stalins_Spoon@lemmygrad.ml 2 weeks ago
AI slop
SleeplessCityLights@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
This is definitely written by an ai, and it’s pure laziness when people don’t fix the styling, which makes it so obvious.
lowleveldata@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
filthy casual
HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The three pathways for most academics
Option 1 - shit out a large pile of bad (either misleading, over-sensationalised, or just clearly partial work) papers, but get funding to do the same for another year.
Option 2 - work hard to create a quality paper, run out of time, no more funding, off you go to industry.
Option 3 - take a teaching intensive role and never have any time for research, oh and also get paid less than in industry.
GrammarPolice@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I can win a Nobel prize too is what i gain from this?
Chakravanti@monero.town 2 weeks ago
Not with no I caps.
dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Would the Nobel prize committee be as petty as you?
Like seriously, you solve a global illness and because you don’t capitalise your i’s then they’ll be like nah fam.
maudelix@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I will be forever grateful that my PI for my doctorate focused on technical and scientific hands-on skills rather than sitting at a desk and writing papers. It helped me much more in my current industry, especially in the field of small-scale bioreactor work.
NovaSel@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I think I heard about this. Good for her! What’d she get a prize for?
Griffus@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
USians would never understand this mindset.
carrylex@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Not all heros wear capes
stelelor@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Some wear lab coats and blue nitrile gloves!
ook@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Sure, not a bad view and I don’t know much about Brunkow and how she works, to be clear… but: you do need all these things in order to get academic funding so you can work on your ideas. Which I am not saying is a great system, it isn’t, but I don’t think it is easy to say these days to academic reseachers, especially early career ones, to not care too much about publications.
turdcollector69@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I find that people high up in academics tend to lose touch with reality.
I remember in college one professor ranting and raving about how students worry about grades too much and that we should all focus on actually retaining the material.
It’s like yeah that’s a pretty thought but 70% of the class was there on scholarship so if we don’t make the grade we don’t finish and have a mountain of debt.
On a separate occasion the dean of engineering wasted 2 full lectures of ethics class ranting about how we should give to the alumni association and how “it’s a privilege to be here so we need to pay it back.”
There were over 100 people in that room who were in at least $60k of debt to the school and we still had another semester left before graduation.
These people have brains the size of planets but couldn’t comprehend in the slightest how reality gets in the way of their pretty little egalitarian ideals.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
and also probably not aware of the JOB market for the students, they are out of touch because they got thiers 20-30+years ago with no competition, or dont have to deal with things like INDEED or screening software. they often give bad advice as advisors(which is forced by college to become advisors), which seems to be common in most universities, just to get you out of the room quicker, so they have to deal with you anymore.