It's extremely difficult to re-gain respect once it's lost. That's just how people are. We form an opinion on somebody, and then look for reasons to justify that opinion, not challenge that opinion.
Also, group/team dynamics are usually influenced by the most vocal. If there was a previous serious conflict with 1 or 2 team members, it's possible they continued to poison the discourse, even when the management quality improved for that week.
Same as with any position in the tech industry. It's not about job applications and education anymore. It's about networking. It's about demonstrating skills through projects. It's about online presence. It's about conferences and events. It's about reaching out to people who have done it before, and learning from them.
That's true, but you're ignoring the other environmental impacts your plastic use (and my plastic use) will have. Raw materials, expanding landfills, landfill leakage, leeched chemicals from plastic bottles/containers into our food/water, reduced bird populations from eating plastics, etc.
It's usually a big deal when a professor fails to make tenure at a respectable university. I can think of multiple case studies at MIT and Stanford. Departments look bad when they are forced to drop promising talent.
He said contemporaries, not friends. Meaning that other successful PHDs/Scientists that put in the same amount of work that he did, but in the private sector, are making that much money.
Science requires repeatability and thorough testing to stabilize theories. If studies are only preformed once and discarded, instead of repeated, we know nothing.
That won't work. The money isn't going to line the pockets of (most) of the researchers. It's going to fund the actual science costs itself, which is millions per project.
The problem is that science nowadays is expensive. We've past the days where scientits can preform chemistry experiments in their garage, most science requires heavily specialized equipment, years of preparation, and/or lots of people.
I don't see a clear way to fix this problem. The projects that have the clearest ROI will continue to get funded first.
The standard rate for overhead billed to a grant is 30% and this has increased over time as has the amount of university administration and their salaries , so almost certainly we're not dealing with increased physical plant costs(typically, specific research equipment is billed to the grant, overhead covers things like building maintenance and admin costs).
So yes, (some) science is expensive, but universities also profit from it.
This really isn't true. Math and computer science research need very little in terms of materials cost. The physical sciences are indeed more of a problem, but I have difficulty believing that everything needs big money to research. Surely a large communal lab would facilitate a lot of smaller scale work?
Those fields aren't the issue, and not what he is discussing in the article. The two fields he mentions, bio-chem (the DNA sequencing) and quantum physics (higgs), both require large amounts of funding to progress. Think the large hadrom collider was cheap? Think a DNA sequencing machine is cheap?
Math is only limited by computer power, and our own personal mental computing power. Computer science, similarly. Those two fields are different from the rest of science as we know it today.
It's true that certain aspects of science are very expensive. We're generating a lot of data these days through DNA sequencing, particle collision, and various other expensive scientific measurement techniques.
But there's a lot of work to be done in making sense of that data. It doesn't cost anything to play with data that's already been collected.
The biggest breakthroughs come from people thinking differently.
Obviously experimental physics can be extremely expensive, but coffee-and-chalk theoretical physics positions like (afaik) Higgs' have roughly the same costs as most math or humanities posts. And apparently theoretical physics has huge problems of PhD oversupply.
Does this disprove your implicit point though? The problem is any position which doesn't cost a lot is attracting way too many people for the amount of possible work.
Meanwhile, the expensive parts - i.e. all the applied physics needed to prove or disprove theoretical physics, is not receiving appropriate funding.
That's a really good point. Many meaningful projects will eventually cost a lot of money.
But I like how Brenner provides an environment for scientists to basically do what they want. Some of them eventually get projects funded, but it's important to have that first stage in which people have the freedom to explore.
A basic income can provide that freedom for everyone.
The problem with "the problem" is that there is no uniquely specified problem. The article is concerned with the use of key performance indicators by administrators to allocate resources to scientific projects in many fields. Math and computer science are also affected by this, contrary to what you say.
Also, group/team dynamics are usually influenced by the most vocal. If there was a previous serious conflict with 1 or 2 team members, it's possible they continued to poison the discourse, even when the management quality improved for that week.