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Science/journalism is a terrible career, which drives out good people. Also, most people going into science/journalism are unfit for it & should be kept out. How to make science/journalism less attractive to the wrong people and more to the right ones?

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chris

@ctbeiser

· Aug 19, 2021

all my smartest friends are like “i’m not willing to do a PhD because the mental health impact is as bad as having your spouse die” and im thinking maybe this is a contributing factor to the whole “lots of science is fake” problem

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

@QiaochuYuan

Aug 19, 2021

a throwaway sentence in Discrete Thoughts casually claimed that science as a profession drastically expanded as a hangover from various wars including the cold war. i don’t have the background to evaluate but seems roughly right to me. way too many people in the field overall

Ludwig

@LudwigBald

Aug 19, 2021

there aren't nearly enough scientists. We need to understand this world ffs

David Chapman

@Meaningness

Aug 19, 2021

The problem is that when quality is low, quantity exacerbates the problem by flooding the literature with material that is false, misleading, trivial, etc.

QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

@QiaochuYuan

Replying to

@Meaningness

and

@LudwigBald

this was my main complaint with actually engaging with, say, arxiv papers as a grad student, although it took me awhile to articulate. almost everything everyone was writing seemed trivial and nobody else seemed to notice or care

4:40 PM · Aug 19, 2021Twitter for iPad

Replying to

and

If you have to publish twelve papers per year, while 93% of your time is taken up with grant writing and filling in professional impact statements, there's not going to be a whole lot of substance in each one.