Meh and you too.

The request was to expand on the 5 big W questions + 1: what, who, where, when, why and how.

So I'll start with a secret: this is the seed of all writing. So I could write something for this topic over and over and write something different each time.



1. What

"What do I do now?" I've been struggling a lot with this question about what do I want to do. I've been through this once before, and that's how I ended up doing science.

So I think I've covered heart and head. What's next? Gut feeling?

I feel like doing science for so long has had two contrasting effects on me:

1) It made me braver, and made me realize courage is not really an area where I'm lacking
2) It put me relatively out of touch with my own gut feelings.

The thing about science is that you're taught not to be superstitious, that hunches don't count unless you can explain them with data, and that you should often ignore your gut feeling, especially if your gut is telling you to run away from public speaking or doing animal work.

Right?

Truthfully, I think my best weapons in science were my gut feelings. But I was told to ignore them, that I was being paranoid about the people I worked with (who were every bit as crazy and back-stabbing as I feared), and that I was making logical leaps (all of which turned out to be right once I had the evidence to demonstrate my hunches were good).

And I wouldn't have done science at all if I had listened to my gut feelings way back when I interviewed for graduate schools.

Regardless, my goal now is to spend a lot of quality time focusing on my gut feelings.




2. Who

"Who is going to help me?"

At this point I'm not sure if anyone can help me figure out what I want to do, but once I figure that out, I will probably need help to do it.

One thing I fucked up royally in my science "career" (according to the blamers) was not getting the right help from the right people. I realized too late that I needed help from different people, but I couldn't figure out

a) who were the people with both the interest and the power to help me, and
b) how to get them to be interested in helping me

Also, "Who are the people I want to work with?"

This is something I'm focused on right now. I really hated most of my coworkers for a long time in science, maybe because we weren't really coworkers at all, just competitors pretending to be polite. The whole system was set up so that there was never enough to go around, and we were basically trying to climb over each other to get to the good stuff: the money, the attention from our advisor, the jobs.

So I'm wondering who are the kinds of people I can work with? Would I be better off with more creative types? Should I just steer clear of male-dominated careers? Am I better off doing the kinds of things where everyone works independently but in parallel? Are there any careers anymore where there's plenty to go around? Or does this economy pretty much preclude that from happening at all?



3. Where

Also known as, "Will I have to relocate?"

I like where I am now. I am learning new things, slowly, and the pace is more or less up to me. But what if I decide the thing I most want to do in life is something I can only learn in a city far away? Am I going to make MrPhD go with me? Is there anything I want to do so badly that I'd make him quit a job he loves to follow me on a hunch about my next big thing?




4. When

Yes, when. When will I figure this out. When will I feel better. When will the bolt of lightning strike me down, or give me that aha! moment I could use right about now?

One thing I'm certain I'll miss about science are the aha! moments. I loved that. I loved problem solving, I loved getting new data, I loved finding something unexpected in the middle of an experiment designed to look at something else, I loved reading a paper and having so many ideas I had to scribble them all down excitedly.

The good news is there are other kinds of aha! moments, and I wish I had the perspective to realize that years ago. They are there when I cook, and when I shop for gifts, and when I read good books. When I listen to really good music. And when I write.

But mostly I want to know when I will stop having dreams about the bastards who fucked me over in science. I am so tired of the nightmares where I have to go back and work with them again, or I find out one of them is taking credit for everything I did in his lab, even though it was my idea, etc.




5. Why

The one I'm doing the most lately is "Why is this happening to me? Why do people say I chose this? Did I choose this, really? Why would I do that to me?"

Also known as,

6. How

"How did I end up here?"

I keep retracing my steps and saying "No, I couldn't possibly have known any better at the time, I actually got a lot of bad advice, or people seemed to think I could figure it out from obscure hints, and I didn't. I didn't figure it out until it was too late."

I made a lot of mis-steps. One foot in front of the other, right?

But it's pretty much impossible for me to see how I could have known to do any differently, given where I came from, my family, and a general lack of good advice.

Does that make me feel any better? Only slightly.

Also, "How do I move forward and get on with my life?"

What I talk about when I talk about science

One of the comments on the last post raised the question of whether scientists mostly sit around talking about:

1) technical problems
2) asshole colleagues/advisors
3) publishing & competing
4) big ideas.

Technical problems: the good and bad of talking about it constantly

the good

Talking about it usually means you'll get advice & commiseration. This might make you feel like less of a loser, and you might learn something that fixes your problem.

It might give you the break you need to head back into the lab and try again.

I love giving advice to others when I know enough to be helpful. I find it satisfying to pass one what I've learned and save other people the trouble of learning the hard way.

I try to be supportive when I can't be useful.

I think if you don't like talking and hearing about technical issues, you shouldn't be in science. Period. This is the bread and butter, day-to-day, one foot in the front of the other. It's how research gets done.

The devil really is in the details.

the bad

Sometimes you get conflicting advice, and that can be confusing.

Sometimes people will be judgmental and it will make you insecure about asking for help again.

Sometimes people are no help, and then you wonder whether you're working in the wrong place, surrounded by people who don't care or don't know anything useful and won't teach you much, or if you're attempting something impossible and wasting your time on a dead-end.

Sometimes I give advice and people don't listen. I've blogged about this before because it's one of my pet peeves. The people who whine and want shortcuts and think it's easier to do it the "easy way" but that doesn't work and then they have to go back and do it all over again. My way might seem "harder" at first but it works, and in the long run that's actually faster. But sometimes I get tired of people asking me and not respecting what I have to say enough to talk to me about why they think it might not work or to just admit they're too lazy.

Assholes in science

I was talking to a grad student the other day about whether there are more assholes in academic science than in other careers. I think there are. She says there are assholes everywhere. I told her I used to believe that, actually had someone tell me that, back when I was in college and debating about whether to pursue a science career.

Now I'm not so sure. I think academic science selects for assholes and cultivates assholishness in otherwise decent people. I've watched it happen. Otherwise decent people, put under enough pressure, become angry starving dogs backed into a corner. They will bite you.

I'm not sure it was always this bad, but it's how it is now.

So yeah, we complain about it. All. The. Time. On blogs especially.

And I've reached a point where I'm just sick of it. I'm sick of working with jerks and I'm sick of hearing about other people being trapped working with jerks. I'm sick of lacking for constructive solutions.

At first, you treat it like just another type of problem-solving. You read all the books on communication and negotiating and you try to out-manipulate the manipulators. For some people, this works, usually in combination with other approaches like mentoring and string-pulling from family & friends.

But I get the feeling that if you need to read books about it (like I do), you're not going to make it through.

After a while, it's boring. It's frustrating being completely powerless and not knowing how to marshall enough support to stand up to these people or maneuver around them (notice the root of these words, man-ipulate and man-euver.).

And then it's like, well I can advise you up to a point but after that, don't ask me. I couldn't figure it out. Just for the love of god, please quit whining to me about it. I tried every iteration I could think of, but it just wasn't working out for me.

Publishing and competition

Truthfully, when I was just a new student who had never done anything myself worth publishing, I never cared about which journal, which author, which institution, or who did what first.

In school, I met people who cared a lot about which journal. My thesis advisor had ideas about which journals were "appropriate" for my work when we went to publish. I had ideas about which journals handled figures well and which ones tended to make them small and unreadable. That was my biggest criterion. Did they present the material well? No? Then I don't care how famous they are. It's not a journal I'd want to be reading.

Then there was the whole authorship thing. Like the collaborators who let us do all the work and then demanded at the end that their student be made co-first author after I had already written the entire manuscript. How was that fair? I realized I wanted people to be citing ME and not her. I did not want someone else to put their name on my writing.

Not having worked at too many different places, I still don't know what I think about the "which institution" question, but it does affect things. I remember sitting in one journal club, listening to the spoiled brats from the richest labs complaining that the authors of a paper from a third-world country hadn't done enough expensive controls. I tried to explain to them what it's like to work in a poor lab. That you have to choose carefully the most important controls that will tell you the most, because you simply can't afford to do them all.

And I remember slowly realizing how much money matters for how much you can do. That it costs about a million dollars to do a Cell paper's worth of work, by the time you pay for everything and everybody's salary who worked on it. And realizing that most labs simply can't afford to do that. And sometimes even the richest labs go through periods when they can't afford to do it for more than one paper at a time. And that paper might not be yours. And it might have nothing to do with which project is the better project. It might have everything to do with who the first authors are and whether the PI likes them more than anyone else.

And realizing how the competition aspect of everything just poisons the atmosphere. Turns people into dogs trying to eat other people they view as competing dogs.

Yeah, I talk about all of that a lot with my science friends. How it's too bad so much good science never sees the light of day because someone else did it first and that supposedly means it's better, when in fact the better stuff often just takes longer. How timing has superceded quality on the list of priorities and how I think that's a terrible thing for science. How timing often comes down to who gossips the most, who fakes or manipulates data, and which famous authors are on their paper. How perhaps it's the famous authors who fake and manipulate and gossip the most. How we all thought science would be less about fame and more about ideas. How we wonder if it was always this way and whether it always will be. Or whether science might implode if things continue on this way.

big ideas

So do we talk about big ideas? Sure.

As much as I'd like? No, not at all.

For quite a while now, I've been very isolated from other people who had similar interests. I talked more about big ideas at meetings than I ever did at my home institution. That was part of why, in the last few years, meetings were the most fun for me. My department was full of people who worked on different big ideas, or who debated endlessly about useless minutiae instead of coming up with ways to test their pet hypotheses. Or who did exclusively "me-too" science. One trick ponies.

At first, I tried to interject. And then I gave up. I would just sit back and let them debate amongst themselves. Sometimes I would try to redirect the conversation to the larger point, to ask, like a broken record, "Yes but how would you TEST that?" But often they would turn to look at me and then go right back to obsessing about which famous guy was right about their ugly cartoon model of their favorite mechanism.

It was hard for me to articulate why I thought even the best cartoon model of their favorite question wouldn't really clarify anything, much as they wanted to know, it wasn't going to move the field forward in any significant way if they weren't doing the right experiments.

But I couldn't figure out how to tell them that productively and have them really hear me. I knew it would just hurt their tiny, insecure feelings.

Also, if I viewed them as my competition, it was easy to see how it was better to let them obsess about something insignificant. Like the Princess and the Pea. If they wanted to think the pea was important, that was fine by me. I would rather that they were exhausted and unable to focus.

Meanwhile, I was sleeping soundly and thinking clearly.

But in general, I always liked the idea that we need both kinds. We need people who care about ideas and people who care about details. I want someone else to do some kinds of nitty gritty and I'll take care of the parts they can't see. That's fine. Ideally, there would be room for everybody.

Yes, when I talk to my friends who are scientists, we talk about the future of science and what the next big discoveries might mean for what we can do sooner or later, and how much later. And why do we have to wait. And can we get our hands on some of that new stuff, can we collaborate.

We talk about what we would do differently if we were in charge of everything. We talk about whether we're helping patients and how can we get our colleagues to think differently, to see what we're saying. How to deal with our own doubts by testing, testing, testing. And how to anticipate our colleagues' skepticisms and be most persuasive.

But mostly, we talk about how tired we are of all the nonsense that gets in the way. How much more we could be getting done if only we had the resources. How un-scientific the academic science hierarchy is. And why nobody seems to want to make the radical changes that would be needed to fix everything that needs fixing.

Relative vs. Absolute

One of the analysis programs I use gives you choices. At one point when you're choosing how to display your data, the choices basically come down to the title of this post. It doesn't change the result, just the scale and portability of the results.

...

Yes, my therapist means to help me. Yes, my advisor may (or may not) have (at least some) good intentions, too. Yes, the same could be said about my parents, who could also be said to have screwed up any number of things about my personality and ability to function in adult life.

This week I've been thinking again about how, while intentions are nice, it doesn't really matter if the outcome is still fatally flawed.

Yes, it's nice to have someone on your side. But if that person is steering you wrong, and you're attaching to them only for the sake of having something to hold onto, that's not really going to help you make any progress.

If that person continually lets you down, whether through selfishness or a lack of appropriate expertise, would you keep on trying? If this is your partner, wouldn't you think hard about whether to continue the relationship? If it were your student, wouldn't you think hard about how many chances to give them? If this is your advisor, wouldn't you want to leave the lab?

At some point, good intentions are not enough.

And maybe not even relevant. Doesn't the bad guy usually think he's doing the right thing? Anybody see Watchmen?

...

I really believe that truth in research is relative. Because whatever we think is true now, it's probably only partly right, and years from now someone with better tools and more insight will realize that we were almost always at least partly wrong.

And yet, some things are absolute. Maybe only hindsight has this property: knowing what you know now, sometimes there was one answer better than the other. But you didn't know that then.

Somehow I find this concept easier to accept in research than in real life. Maybe because it's more clear to me how we couldn't have known. In research I read everything I can; I review my data as much as I can; I run all the analyses I can think of and that the software can manage.

In real life, I often find myself wondering if I could just have read the right books or talked to the right people, would I have known sooner what I know now? Because most of this is probably not new, not the way cutting-edge research is new. I'm sure most of my struggles in life and philosophy are old news. What I'm doing in life really is re-search.

So while intentions can only be relative, outcomes can be absolute.

...

At some point, you have to look at the data and say, is this working well enough to justify the time and cost?

I do this almost every day in research. I'm not sure everyone does- there must be a few labs with so much money, that it would be possible to get your PhD and sail through your postdoc never realizing how expensive it all is until you go to write your own R01.

But that isn't how my career has been. I'm always asking, usually before I even do a pilot run, can I afford this even if it does work? What will I do if it's working and I need to buy more and we can't afford that? How much information can I get if this is all I get to do?

It is all worth it?

It's really hard to work this way. It's like having a phobia of commitment. As a serial monogamist, I can tell you it's really a strain when your natural inclination is to throw yourself all in, but you know it's too risky because you'll just be heartbroken when it ends.

On the other hand, you have to start everything with a relatively open mind. There is no absolute intention, because we're all biased whether we mean to be or not.

So when we say "have an open mind' in science, we mean that you try to be objective, whether that means quenching your optimism or your pessimism, sometimes it depends on the person and the day of the experiment. Maybe you can't suppress your gut feeling, but you also know from (relative) experience, we're all wrong about 50% of the time. So you get used to acknowledging your fears and trying anyway. Some people call that brave.

...

Science has taught me a lot of things (so far?).

The length of diligence is always longer than you think.

Courage to try even when you think you'll fail again and again; even when you have failed.

Persistence doesn't even begin to cover how many times you have to pick yourself up and keep trying.

Patience with yourself can be harder than any other kind of patience. Patience with experiments can be easier than patience with other people or with circumstances.

Anger can be empowering.

Silence can raise your stock, but it isn't always powerful. Sometimes it's just passive.

Some people define truth from all angles.

Some people define truth like this:

if you just say it this way, it's technically true, and everyone will be happier.

Some people define truth as outcomes; some define it as implications.

Willfully naive.

Lately I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around just how fucked up science is.

Whenever I think I've seen the worst, something else happens and I think:

Holy crap, how is that even possible.

The depths of human folly, that's how.

But I think my problem stems from this idea I had that scientists would be somehow better people, more objective- even to the point of admitting their own biases- than most. That these people were my people.

But most of us are not objective. Not even trying to see our own biases, most of the time.

I'm having trouble finding my people among these people. Yes, blogger-types, I have enjoyed "meeting" many of you online, but I'm not sure how to meet you in real life. Or if we would even get along.

I'm having trouble connecting with my feelings about this because I think one of the things that helped me do science thus far has been learning how to step back, how to not take it personally if something doesn't work, or if I happen to have a wrong hypothesis for a while. I'm really glad whenever I recognize this, that I'm holding onto something too hard. I always feel like when I let go of something, I'm making progress.

So now I'm trying to separate my feelings about science - in principle, a good idea to study the world using evidence-based, hypothesis-driven, observational methods, right?

And my impressions of most successful scientists: deeply insecure human beings with low EQs, who are trying to make up for being socially stigmatized as children by being bullies on the scientist playground as adults.

To some extent, I've known for a long time that truth is relative.

But in another way, I don't think I fully appreciated just how fucked up the process is of deciding what is currently true. Just who gets to decide, and why it's them and not anybody else.

I think I thought that, no matter how insecure the scientist, most people would be forced to admit in the face of evidence, what is objectively real and what is not.

Interpretation is up for debate, okay. But it turns out that even the objective definition of "real" and "fake" depends entirely on people's perceptions and willingness to admit their fear and insecurity.

I guess I've been thinking about this because a friend's paper got rejected recently with reviews that basically accused her of lying. But the evidence is right there in the paper, and this particular kind of result can't be faked.

It's infuriating because it's almost religious, this kind of argument. Which means there is basically no way to win.

And this is kind of how I feel about science in general lately. That there are so many bullies around, we can't get any real science done.

In thinking about this, one of my memories of elementary school came back to me with visceral clarity.

I always hated recess, because as a kid I wasn't very athletic at all. I was always bored at recess. I would probably have been happier to sit outside and read a book, but for some reason I think they wouldn't let us take books outside. I remember watching the other kids chasing each other around, throwing balls, hanging off the monkey bars.

And I was just waiting for it to end, so we could go back inside. Probably backwards from how kids are supposed to be, but I was much happier sitting in class.

I kept watching the other kids, trying to figure out what I could learn from them. I couldn't figure out what I was missing, since I couldn't do what they did. Maybe if I could have run around in circles, I would have gotten the data I was missing.

I guess this is sort of a metaphor for how I feel about the scientist playground. I feel like yeah, maybe it serves some purpose, and maybe most people enjoy all the monkeying around.

I've even come to learn to appreciate some of it that I didn't before- having drinks with friends, shooting the shit. It can even be the fun part when you're at a meeting sharing data all day. Just to do something else for a couple of hours in the evening, use a different part of your brain. That makes sense to me now.

But most days, even in lab I keep feeling like I did in elementary school: like I'm wandering around the playground by myself, looking for someone to talk to, who also wants to go back inside and do the fun part.

Read my lips. Who's in charge.

A comment on my last post regarding whether or not postdocs should be presenting their own work brings up a topic I've written about before, but which I think is important enough to keep repeating.

I went to a talk the other day where an older (though maybe only 60-ish!) guy presented the work of two of his postdocs (out of how many in his lab, I don't know).

In the talk, he did something I've only rarely seen PIs do: pointing out that one of the postdocs was present and available to answer questions "since he knows the work better than I do". I wasn't sure whether to be happy or sad that he said that. Maybe a little of both.

And since then (and the comment on my last post about who would you rather see present the work, the PI or the postdoc) I've been thinking about this quite a bit.

In one way, yes the more experienced PIs can often be better speakers because they don't get stage fright, and they've given these talks hundreds of times. They have a certain amount of authority. You get a polished product, maybe a little more historical perspective (I'll come back to that), and maybe another benefit: 1 PI can talk about 2 or more projects in a single talk. And it's perfectly acceptable, maybe even expected, for them to do so.

On the other hand, you can't ask them anything technical, usually they don't know the answer. I actually saw a guy do this at a talk once, with what I think was deliberate aim: he asked several technically challenging questions in quick succession, and the PI speaker was basically stunned into silence. I was hysterical with silent laughter.

And there is this other aspect that most PIs don't want to admit: a senior postdoc is basically the same as a junior PI. Admittedly, junior PIs don't get to give talks as often as senior PIs, but they give talks more often than postdocs.

The point of this comparison is that in at least some (!) cases the senior postdoc proposed the project, did the project, and has lots of ideas for where her project will go next, since it is presumably the subject of her future grants and lab studies. Senior PI guy might not know those things, and might not, in some cases, really appreciate the importance and implications of the work that has already been done.

In general I was thinking about this because I was noticing once again how it seems like the postdocs and grad students are actually driving the research behind the scenes, and the PIs are really just figureheads. They're not exactly puppets, but in a way they could be. In some labs they are.

The historical perspective aspect is an important one, and I can't emphasize enough how much it annoys me when a grad student or postdoc is asked a question about the history of their own field and can't answer it.

The other day I asked a question like this and the speaker (a postdoc) looked at me and said very dismissively, "That's very philosophical" and continued on without even attempting to answer. Sheesh! I actually know a little more about her field than she might realize. I know she could have answered my question succinctly, in just 1 sentence that conveyed the traditional thinking as well as her personal take on it.

Instead, I am left to conclude that she hasn't read the classic papers in her field (even though I have!). Which made me wonder if she's not one of these glorified technician types that some PI commenters are always complaining about (?).

I'll agree, I don't want to see that kind of postdoc presenting talks. I'd take a senior PI over that sort of person any day. But I think most PIs know that, and that's why they don't generally give their talk slots away to their postdocs.

Having said that, sometimes I'd rather hear one, complete story from an articulate postdoc than a bunch of snippets from a breezy world-traveling PI who can't answer questions effectively. I always feel sorry for the postdocs who did the work, because I know the talk rarely gives them the credit they deserve.

Will I give talks away to my postdocs? Sure, when they're good speakers and have a good story to tell. They might not come into the lab that way, but I'll make sure they gain those skills quickly and practice them sufficiently before they leave.

I like to travel, but I already know that most PIs are invited to more meetings than they can possibly attend in a year, and their labs suffer when they're constantly out of town. A handful of meetings a year is enough! I'd much rather send my postdocs to some of them. To me, that's a win-win.

Indulge me for a moment

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Fortune Cookie

Success is being able to go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

Great quotes

It's interesting that this blog has sampled the population the way my research has: some people hate me, some people don't.

I don't know why I provoke such strong reactions from some people.

Why do some people get SO upset, and want to post their anger here for everyone to read? They have nothing better to do? If they don't, they might explode?

Please, people. Don't spontaneously combust just from something I said! I couldn't live with that on my conscience.

Some people seem to get it. If you're truly objective, you've reached that Zen state where you can discuss ideas, even ones that you might disagree with, as ideas, not as reflections of the person who proposed them.

I can't take it personally when people freak out and post here, but I am a little tired of reading all the negative, mis-spelled, non-constructive comments. It really is embarrassing how stupid some of them are, but I guess they feel the same way about me. I'm a bad representation of a scientist, is that it?

Here's another reason I started this blog: because scientists are people too. But nobody seems to know that.

At this point so many of the comments here are crap that I don't know where to draw the line on deleting them. Seems silly to just delete everything negative, but on the other hand, does leaving it all up there just encourage these people to come back and do it again?

In the past I've gotten so many helpful, informative comments that I've never wanted to turn off the commenting feature despite all the negative crap. Posting into the void is a lot less interesting.

But I'm picturing these people in their little cubicles or wherever they are, snickering to themselves as they write these petty little Anonymous comments and rubbing their hands together in a perfect imitation of an evil cartoon character.

It's actually really funny to imagine!

I mean, do you really think you're going to a) convince me to quit blogging or b) convince me to quit science?

For anyone else out there who has experienced these kinds of attacks, some quotes for us:

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
--Schopenhauer

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
--Gandhi

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
--Gandhi

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
--Gandhi

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
--John Cage

Who's a hikikomori?

Maybe me, a little bit.

Was reading about this phenomenon in the New York Times Magazine, but you can look it up in wikipedia.

Basically it tends to start with teenagers, but because of the way Japanese society is set up, these kids stay at home, sometimes for a couple of decades. They lock themselves in their rooms and don't interact with anyone, although it sounds like most of them spend a lot of time on the internet.

It's funny because it's more common with boys, but I completely understand the urge. When I'm particularly lost, I just want to spend a lot of time alone, at home. Apparently, the psychologists surmise, it has something to do with the feeling that there's nothing to contribute, that there are no good career paths, and that there has been too much pressure to perform.

Sound familiar, anyone? It does to me.

Again, this kind of fits with my last post- the people who end up 'recovering' do so by being rescued. There are groups that provide, essentially, friends for a fee- the parents pay to have someone of a similar age come and visit, try to get their kid out of the house and back into daily life. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Anyway this really struck a chord with me. Little did I know, there are others out there who, like me, just feel like the system isn't working for us.

I find it very interesting that nobody seems to accuse them of being depressed. Instead, it sounds like choosing to withdraw, to be a 'shut-in', is just a different kind of lifestyle. Very different from the attitudes in this country.

I've often said I would have been quite happy as a scientist hundreds of years ago, puttering away in isolation. I'm with Sartre, and the hikikomori: Hell is other people.