This is a post I wrote on Linked In in response to another post. I have very few words for whatever is happening when I am only interacting with myself, so sometimes, inspiration comes from even a job search platform turned work water cooler space online (wouldn’t it be cool to have little sims characters we could design instead of being a head in a square screen?) I probably lost all readers now, but here’s the goose that laid this egg of a blog post.
Good professors don’t receive positive feedback from whatever amorphous cloud selects for promotions. Doing one’s job according to the abstract job of “professor” & excelling at it, as described in this example, should result in compounding interest.
Why is it that these behaviors are not only not rewarded, but seemingly selected out of the population of professors? I’m confused as an ecologist & population evolutionary biologist who thinks abt rapid change & the study of what constitutes a healthy space… as to the ecosystem's regulation of resources-the ecosystem resources being money and power- as I think we’ve all learned another time that respect, or to re-examine, re-see, is not something the other two can compare with fairly.
Edited:Since everyone demands listiciles here we go ,but know I resent it, jk I just finally feel I can authentically speak my peace on this very super trivial opinion regarding lists. On LinkedIn my audience is mostly biomed or academics, so this is this list (paragraph I broke down arbitarily based on simplistic number of sentences as denoted by periods below.)
1. Reward good behaviors with demonstrative results and one will artificially select a happy healthy community.
2. Don't reward on the simple number of publications derived from a name.
3. Most scientists agree that the output of success that's quantifiable to qualify as a scientist are the number of papers derived from one name at every stage of career.
4. Under our current metrics for evaluating the value and performance of an academic, this # ultimately dictates the capacity to participate in furthering the scientific endeavor.
5. The sheer number of papers derived from names dicates who is allowed to and who is not allowed to participate in decisions.
6. These decisions are vast and truly impact research around health and how to determine treatments & therapies & diagnostics focus of research.
7. In turn, this dictates the scope of what is and is not considered to be considered truth.
8. Even more troublesome, is that there's incentives like money, authority, increased ability to demand change in behaviors or removal from the system within populations applying selection pressures.
9. This is troublesome as it confounds selection of merit based on instantiated endpoints.
10. This is due to imprecise and incredibly inaccurate approaches to object classification.
11. Object classification (OC) inconsistencies with reality have lead to promotion based on comparisons of # of pubs, not iteration on ideas or producing something of value.
12. In my opinion, iterating on not just research but knowledge in general, is more imporant to a shared truth with positive results for fellow citizens than comparing a quantified metric that still increases rapidly/daily for a dead man (Euler) than most living scientists conducting research currently.
What can we do?
1. I implore trainees to support the good ones as much as they can, give positive feedback to good and bad eggs.
2. Note the behavior not the individual, if comparisons are to be made.
3. Determine an endpoint for evaluating if compared behavior between individuals is different than the change in the individual you are evaluating again.
4. This iteration allows for a resource allocation evaluation, in which we can learn (build upon former knowledge) how to provide incentives to behaviors that align with prior, that is before evaluation, instantiated endpoints.
5. If something goes wrong here it is due to the ambiguity of our words, and I should hope my fellow peers realize the responsibility of this notion.
6. With whatever influence you have try your best to give carrots and not use sticks in a population starving for kindness.
7. My fellow science peers have lost so much humanity in the eyes of the public that we are actively allocating resources to "humanize" ourselves.
8. I cannot think of anything more recursive than an entire group of humans with shared interests and passions having to allocate resources to appear human.
9. As an aside, this feels like the turing test, prison dilemma, and Searle's thought experiment all wrapped up in the tragedies described in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, one of my favorite pieces of literature so concise the words make one's heart bleed and eyes weep at the same time as cracking a smile at humanities true commitment to being human, whether they like it or not. One oF Kurt Vonnegut's final interviews relayed that this is the book he hoped readers would treasure, as it helped him and he hoped it would help others, feel relief in the concept that we don't fully understand fundamental properties of time, and to revel in such ideas in moments of despair.