Eh, no. The reality is that there is always a pressure to produce more papers with positive results.
You can safely ignore everybody, as long as you do it with your own money; or when you achieve the status of holy cow. Big mistake otherwise.
I'd even go so far as to say today this is a sign of a strong academic department, one that is comfortable with its faculty sometimes having periods of time where they are going against trend. Unfortunately, it's becoming less and less common.
Academics are responsible for sorting out academic funding and likely always will be, pretending the 2 are separate creates problems such as is seen in biology (and yes, other sciences to an extent) where big funding from the private sector is forcing open publically funded research for the greater good toward lining the pockets of nouveau-industrialists.
For me the more difficult part right now is learning how to become self motivated. Going from having my supervisor coaching me in my PhD to being basically totally unsupervised and free to work on what I want in my postdoc has been very difficult both for my work and my mental health. You have to become almost totally self reliant. You start to value and amplify every bit of motivation you get. Discipline doesn’t cut it, because a lot of academic work is impossible to force. There aren’t many mechanical aspects of it, almost all of my work requires a tonne of diverse creative thinking, even just responding to reviewer comments
Back on stupidity, one of my favourites things has become to ask “stupid questions” as a postdoc. Partly because as a postdoc, people just assume you are very smart, so there is no pressure to “look good” or “not say stupid things”. There’s something weirdly liberating about hearing a bunch of very technical questions from PhD students and then me deciding to ask a very basic conceptual question. That said there are “stupid” questions and then there are ignorant ones, and the line is often blurry
This was my case during my PhD (physics). My supervisor was not competent enough in my field of studies to help me from a science perspective (I had a co-supervisor who had more information, but not too much - it was a really unique area at that time).
BUT - he was a wonderful, extraordinary person when helping me travel the muddy waters of academia. He was always there to arrange after some, let's say, more "heavy" discussions. I was really delighted to have him as a supervisor.
He also let me roam free in innovative areas, he supported me when I wanted to publish 45 pages of thesis, when the norm was more 200+. He was really, really great.
I started to work in academia during my PhD and he was concerned I would not finish it. I sworn him that I would, before the end of the millenium. I had my defense mid December of the last year :)
I kept on visiting him over the years, presented him my children but he unfortunately died last year. RIP Prof. J.
I would also argue that it really does not take to be a postdoc to ask these questions. Hardly anyone thinks "this was a stupid question".
Feeling stupid isn't good, relising you don't know everything and how that doesn't make you stupid is. Especially when you then harness that into driving yourself to learn about whatever that is, childcare, science, politics...
If you start to act like you can do no wrong then you get situations like academics system getting hacked. The IT guys have to deal with the fall-out, and the academic is still demaning that they get full root access to do the same thing all over again despite not learning from the situation.
My supervisor more or less completely ignored me during my PhD, with hindsight I'm not entirely sure how he got away with it.
Inevitably, technology changes, and at some point you have to learn a new language, programming paradigm, database, or what-have-you. One feels again that one does not know what to do, at first. It's rather like feeling stupid. I have become able simply to say to myself, 'ah, yes, that feeling again, it shall pass in time', and just keep working at it (whatever 'it' is that year).
If you haven't felt like you don't know what you're doing in many years, your programming career has stalled, and I believe you should seek out a new skill to learn that makes you feel stupid while learning it, pronto. It takes practice to remain calm while having that feeling, and if you haven't had it in years you might let it panic you into thinking you can no longer program.
You spend time and effort when you are younger (eg 15) to develop skills that allow you to be productive and valuable.
Learning entirely orthogonal skills when you’re older no longer pays off after a certain point because the opportunity cost of not using your existing skills to produce becomes too large.
To make an extreme analogy, there is no point in Warren Buffet to learn to program at his stage of his career (or even 30 years ago). Any time spent not reading financial reports is such a huge opportunity cost that he really has no reason to learn any other skill.
Another extreme example is Lang Lang the pianist has no reason to pick up the violin. He has absolutely nothing to gain by learning new musical instruments.
Science is a special career where learning new things is important for longevity. A productive science career involves breaking new ground, picking up the low hanging fruit before your competitors do, then move on to break new ground once your old field becomes saturated. Learning new things is strategic, where you try to leverage existing expertise to break ground in new fields.
One way to define of "experience" is "optimize for solving problems in the current environment". As you accrue experience, the best way to provide value to others is in an unchanging world that lets you leverage what you already know. When the world changes, some of your experience gets invalidated, making you less useful. So there's a natural incentive to prefer the status quo as you age, not out of any intrinsic heartlessness or selfishness, but just because you are most useful to yourself and others in a familiar world.
The young, however, don't feel this same pressure. They have relatively little experience—i.e. they aren't particularly good at getting things done in the current environment—and they do learn quickly. So they are incentivized to want change and to explore novel environments since those environments are no worse for them than the current one. Or, in other words, every environment is equally novel when you're young, so why not try a new one that puts you on more even footing with the older folks?
This is likely always true, but in most fields the skill remains in demand for centuries; wainwright may not pay like it used to (or maybe it does, I don't know) but the decline in demand is slow enough that nobody has to bail out, as long as youngsters aren't continuing to plow into that field it's fine. In programming, the hotness of 10 years ago may already be at its peak, and if you're not willing to move on when you're in your 30's to learn something new, you have sentenced yourself to decades of working in a shrinking job market, which is kind of soul-crushing. Nothing to make your current job intolerable like thinking there's nowhere else you can go.
So, while Lang Lang may not choose to pick up the violin, it is probably fine, because the pianoforte is going to be a good skillset for the rest of his life. The harpsichord players who refused to move on to piano or organ may not have had a crisis in mid-career, because the transition from harpsichord to piano was slow enough to happen over generations. Programming tech changes faster than that (for better or worse).
My daughter is learning HTML & CSS, as she's getting annoyed with copying and pasting headers.
Her work is ugly as can be, but she is totally in love with it and proud of it. Think back to early Geocities days.
I'm sure one day she will be embarrassed by her early work, but for now, she's enthusiastic and gaining useful skills.
Totally agree on the advantages of youthful arrogance (in this context).
I have to admit though, it took me until about 35 in age to being able to say to myself: “You know, if you don't understand something, it because it’s hard.” Total game changer for my attitude.
Before that I relied a bit on a certain naïveté, as a biologist among physicists I was sometimes called “Stupid biologist”, I guess it helped seeing it as the joke that it probably was for the most part.
Most scientists are just "normal" people like everybody else, and are vastly more aware of the difficulty of getting things right in scientific work. Get to know a few of us!
As for the topic of the thread, I think "stupid" might be an extreme term, but every scientist has experienced being wrong about things, over and over again. But it's a different kind of wrong: Being shown that we are wrong by Mother Nature, because we invited her to do so. On the other hand, the only "wrong" that most people outside of science experience is anticipating the wrong side of a choice of humans that is ultimately arbitrary, subjective, or random. The difference is being rationally wrong, rather than being socially wrong, for lack of better terms.
What I think makes prominent scientists seem "arrogant" to the public is that they expect us to behave as if our predictions are ultimately decided subjectively, i.e., to hedge our bets, and to give social encouragement to both "sides" of an issue. We don't give out participation trophies, nor do we ask for them. If I'm wrong about something, I'm not "wrong but tried hard." I'm just plain wrong. I'll be wrong again.
“If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called RESEARCH.”
Need I mention the reproducibility crisis, poor funding models, retractions from front-page of nature within the single field...
"Naivete" I can agree with. Stupidity is not and should _never_ be encouraged or endorsed. Even if common use of American English tends to push the meaning of the former onto the latter.
Definitions of words are very important when communicating openly and honestly. This is not an attack on commonly used words in American language, it's an observation. British English (and I assume others) are following suit as America leads the way in "english-speaking" culture. Mixing word definitions is entering into a quasi-mixed up state where people don't know the exact definitions of words which makes difficult good-faith conversation difficult.
