{"id":13907,"date":"2024-04-05T13:06:59","date_gmt":"2024-04-05T17:06:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=13907"},"modified":"2024-04-06T09:38:16","modified_gmt":"2024-04-06T13:38:16","slug":"how-i-fell-out-of-love-with-academia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=13907","title":{"rendered":"How I fell out of love with academia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sabine Hossenfelder today posted a new video on youtube<\/a> which everyone in theoretical physics should watch and think seriously about. She tells honestly in detail the story of her career and experiences in academia, explaining very clearly exactly what the problems are with the conventional system for funding research and for training postdocs.<\/p>\n

After a string of postdocs requiring moving and living far from her husband, she decided she needed to move back to Germany and applied for a grant to fund her research (I believe for this project<\/a>). This is how she describes the situation:<\/p>\n

At this point I\u2019d figured out what you need to put into a grant proposal to get the money. And that\u2019s what I did. I applied for grants on research projects because it was a way to make money, not because I thought it would leave an impact in the history of science. It\u2019s not that what I did was somehow wrong. It was, and still is, totally state of the art. I did what I said I\u2019d do in the proposal, I did the calculation, I wrote the paper, I wrote my reports, and the reports were approved. Normal academic procedure.<\/p>\n

But I knew it was bullshit just as most of the work in that area is currently bullshit and just as most of academic research that your taxes pay for is almost certainly bullshit. The real problem I had, I think, is that I was bad at lying to myself. Of course, I\u2019d try to tell myself and anyone who was willing to listen that at least unofficially on the side I would do the research that I thought was worth my time but that I couldn\u2019t get money for because it was too far off the mainstream. But that research never got done because I had to do the other stuff that I actually got paid for.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As that grant ended, she decided to try instead applying for grants to work on research that she found to be more promising and not bullshit, but those grant proposals were not successful. Since then, she has left the academic research system and concentrated on trying to make a career oriented around high-quality Youtube videos about scientific research.<\/p>\n

It seems to me that Hossenfelder correctly analyzes the source of her difficulties: “The real problem I had, I think, is that I was bad at lying to myself.” Those more successful in the academic system sometimes criticize her as someone just not as talented as themselves at recognizing and doing good research work. But I see quite the opposite in her story. Many of those successfully pursuing a research career in this area differ from her in either not being smart enough to recognize bullshit, or not being honest enough to do anything about it when they do recognize bullshit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sabine Hossenfelder today posted a new video on youtube which everyone in theoretical physics should watch and think seriously about. She tells honestly in detail the story of her career and experiences in academia, explaining very clearly exactly what the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13907"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13910,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13907\/revisions\/13910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}