Hi Chapos,

We need to talk about science: how it’s made, who it’s made by, who it’s made for, and why capitalism sucks for science. Mods, please pin.

I’d like to start a semi-regular discussion thread about what science is, the institutions in which it takes place, the role of regulatory forces (and lack thereof), and in general the problems capitalism has created for science. I’m doing this to follow up on a few discussion threads from the early days of chapo, which I think are worth continuing, specifically this, this and this recent thread from yesterday.

First some definitions of terms:

Researchers, please note, that for the purposes of communication and to help folks from outside the lab and ivory tower join the conversation, when I say “science”, I mean all forms of professional-level, formal, systematically organized research, meaning I’m including non-scientific research here as well. I’m not making a distinction here, because in my experience, it doesn’t matter what field your is or how “scientific” your research methods may or may not be compared to other fields. There are problems in research which affect us all, it’s often just a matter of degree within field, lab, and our own individual abilities to cope with/avoid certain issues.

Science is an ideal, which we strive for in practice; it shapes our methods, logic, and conclusions. Academia is the deeply corrupt, capitalist institution in which much of science takes place; it shapes our labor and the science we produce. This means, it doesn’t matter what field you’re in - most of these issues are likely apparent in your field, to some degree. That said, some issues will certainly be more apparent than others in different fields in different labs and in different countries.

For those outside research reading along, please note that this means the word “science” is not synonymous with “technology”. For example in this thread the top comment is a debate about nuclear technology. There is a lot more going on in science than nuclear and climate change (and I’m saying that as a scientist who studies the psychology of the energy transition! I know better than most about subjective perceptions of nuclear energy and I’m sorry to say it’s not something you can easily change with posting). If you want to struggle-sesh about a specific technology or solution to a specific problem like climate change, please start a new post and keep your debate contained there.

My goal is to post these semi-regularly in hopes of starting a conversation which often takes place within science on a platform outside our offices and classrooms. Here are some of the topics I thought of, and this list is by no means in complete, so please offer suggestions for more:

  • The publication process, peer review, and authorship
  • The tenure pipeline: exploitation of grad students, postdocs, and adjunct professors
  • How publish or perish hinders scientific progress (e.g., by promoting fragmentation and unreliable findings)
  • The reproducibility crisis (started in my own field but now is seen as a problem for all of science)
  • Science communication/”public outreach”/”valorization”
  • The PhD mental health crisis, low graduation (high drop-out) rates, and burn-out more generally
  • Transdisciplinary research (aka research that goes beyond formal disciplines to include practitioners and the public) & citizen science
  • Open science: what is it, what’s it trying to do, and how it’s received
  • Why some prominent “senior” scientists see Open Science as a conspiracy
  • Sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, etc in science

I’d also be happy to discuss things like university tuition rates, exploitation of student athletes, but for now, these things seem more to me like symptoms of the larger cause I’d like to discuss.

So chapos, what do you think? Any interest in on-going BTS science conversations? What do you want to talk about in these threads? What do you think you’d get out of them personally? Which topic would you like to talk about first?

  • DecolonizeCatan [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 years ago

    Tenured professors by themselves actually don’t contribute much to society. A lot of research, with regards to black holes, theoretical quantum physics, biodiversity and the well being of exotic species like polar bears don’t contribute that much. Look deep inside, even as biggest science fans you know it is true. At least they clearly don’t contribute as much as the research grant warrants. 1 million USD of taxpayer money to fly bunch of grad students to Patagonia and dig up Pleistocene mammal bones, really?

    I’m not sure I agree. The neoliberal era has seen the focus of research shift towards entrepreneurial ends and away from fundamental research. One indication of this trend is the massive increase in technology transfers from university to industry in the form of intellectual property. For example, this report by the National Academy of Engineering states:

    Many top universities, such as Stanford, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Southern California, have had technology transfer offices since the 1970s. These offices rose in stature when the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 gave universities the rights to technologies developed with federal funds, creating new incentives for institutions and faculty alike to commercialize their work. … The Bayh-Dole Act enabled the development of new university spinoffs (i.e., companies formed to license a technology).

    Interest in university technology grew dramatically in the 1990s after a group from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) developed the Mosaic web browser (NCSA 2016) commercialized by the newly-formed Netscape Communications, whose initial public offering in 1995 effectively launched the first so-called “dot-com boom.” Although Netscape did not license the technology from UIUC, the tremendous success of the company highlighted the potential value of technologies and technical talent harbored inside universities.

    The report goes on to claim that 30% of the value of the NASDAQ originates from IP that was created by federally funded basic research at universities that was transferred to industry in the wake of Bayh-Dole. So at least from the point of view of capital, tenured professors’ research in STEM is an important source of new IP, which in turn is the basis of the tech industry’s monopoly profits, which in turn is a major source of American imperial influence.

    My background is in physics, and it was easy to see how the neoliberalization of university research played out. Nowadays, the esoteric fields like black hole physics and fundamental quantum research are very small communities relative to the physics community as a whole. Since the 70s physics funding has shifted to fields like condensed matter, and more recently to interdisciplinary fields (esp biophysics) where there is much greater potential for research to produce new markets and new IP for capital to exploit.

    TL:DR Overall I agree with the main point of your comment–that industry exploits the burnouts from academia, and that educating the next generation of high-tech wage workers is a major function of academic science. However, I don’t think academic STEM research itself should be dismissed as socially useless. Under neoliberalism, academic research itself has been increasingly oriented towards serving monopoly capital.