The flight of the Weird Nerd from academia
Is academia becoming a less hospitable place for The Weird Nerd?
Most men will not swim before they are able to.” Is that not witty? Naturally, they won't swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they wont think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.
(Hermann Hesse- Der Steppenwolf)
The above quote from Der Steppenwolf is a good encapsulation of the difficulty faced by The Intellectual, or shall we say, in more modern terms, The Weird Nerd. Weird Nerds are distinguished by their unyielding devotion to Truth, often placing it above social graces or conventional norms. That’s one of the reasons the Nerd is “drowning”, as Hesse put it. This species, while occasionally difficult to interact with, plays a crucial role in society, acting as an innovator and “village truth-teller”. In the last decades, Weird Nerds have found a sanctuary within the confines of academia, a natural habitat where their traits are not only tolerated, but often nurtured. In this symbiotic relationship, the wider world benefits from the intellectual pursuits and discoveries of the Weird Nerd, without the need to engage directly with its often annoying demeanour. It's a situation that seems to maintain a harmonious balance: the Weird Nerd is protected from “drowning”, while society at large reaps the rewards of its unique contributions without having to deal directly with it.
Has there been a disturbance in this equilibrium recently ? This is what
argues in a recent tweet:
He ascribes a lot of it to economic forces: in essence, The Weird Nerd has been poached away from Academia by simple market forces.
Completely anecdotally, I tend to agree with Nate.
What I will add, is that in The Weird Nerd’s place, I have noticed the proliferation of a different type of species in academia: what I call The Failed Corporatist. This is someone who stumbles upon academia not so much out of a love for The Truth, as due to an inability to thrive in corporate settings for various other, unrelated reasons. But the Failed Corporatist has a very conventional, corporate like mindset anyway. It usually loves process, admin and adding more admin and adding more process and METRICS and social conformity. This skill set enables them to ascend the ranks of academic administration, often gaining significant influence and control over The Weird Nerd. Confronted with this altered habitat, The Nerd often finds itself in a state of distress and confusion. Its intrinsic motivation clashes with the newly imposed corporate-like order and the demand for conformity, leading to frantic efforts to assert its natural tendencies. Unfortunately, these efforts are often met with resistance or outright rejection, not only from The Failed Corporatist but also from the broader world that the academic reserve is a part of. All in all, I think this disturbance means the remaining Nerds are further driven away.
Now, this is all anecdotal, but might we be on to something?
Biology Professor Jason Sheltzer has an interesting thread today that points in this direction. Through an ad hoc analysis, Jason discovered that while 66% of the top national winners at the Intel/Westinghouse Science Fair from 1990 to 2002 pursued careers in academia, this number dropped to less than a third for winners from 2003 to 2014. Now, for this to support my and Nate’s observations, you have to assume the Science Fair winners are good representations of the Weird Nerd. I personally think that’s a valid assumption! If you scroll down in his thread, you will see indeed some illustrious names of current academics among these winners. I’ll add to this list recent Nobel Laureate Katalin Kariko, who describes in her book having scored 3rd in her country in the Biology Olympiad. This is the closest thing Eastern European countries have to a Science Fair.
Now, if these Nerds are starting companies then maybe this is fine, they could do their research in those more entrepreneurial environments. It’s not ideal - in another post I explain that I do not think commercial research, even in small start-up settings, can replace fundamental academic research; still, it’s better than if they all went into Quant Finance, as Nate suggests.
But this “Entrepreneurial Nerd” hypothesis does not seem to be true. In fact, Jason’s analysis shows that Nate’s idea of what happened is more realistic:
Now, there is nothing wrong with working for Google or Quant Finance. But if I think start-up research is not going to replace academic research, that’s even less the case for big company research, especially Quant Finance! There’s a real risk here that even start-ups will run out of stuff to build on if high-quality fundamental research will cease to be done in academia.
Are we witnessing a radical restructuring of academia? And will The Failed Corporatist forever displace The Weird Nerd? And if this is the case, isn’t this what Metascience should be focused on, first and foremost, given the importance of human capital?
Has academia become less hospitable? Or have a lot of net-new attractive-to-Weird-Nerds jobs emerged on the market? The number of $200k+ TC SWE jobs has grown massively over the past decade, far outpacing the growth of academic STEM positions.
I believe that two other aspects are relevant:
- academia selects for personality types that may be negatively correlated with the Weird Nerd stereotype: a successful career in academia requires mentoring PhD students and teaching, which both may not be in the comfort zone of a lot of Weird Nerds.
- success ratio: academia is very much an up or out game. For those who don't exit early but fail to get tenure, the further career outlook is pretty bleak. Unless you collaborate really closely with industry during your academic career (like doing a couple of visiting researcher stints), switching tracks later might get really hard, so there's more than just an opportunity cost to it.
So maybe, for a lot of Weird Nerds, going into academia was merely the best shot they felt they had. But only a small fraction actually blossomed there, even before the rise of the Failed Corporatists.
Isn't the percentage of PhDs who go into academia nowadays lower in general because of fewer faculty openings than graduates? If that's true, then that's a huge confounding variable to consider, though perhaps that would be part of the "economic forces" aspect of it. And isn't it awfully similar, in basic substance, to an argument in the Unz Review (https://www.unz.com/article/are-women-destroying-academia-probably/) that having more women in academia is the culprit for this because on average women are more conscientious and more agreeable, which selects for, in his words, the "head girl" type (neurotypical "high-achiever"-coded) instead of the "brave truth-teller/lone eccentric genius" type (autistic nerd-coded)? It seems that all you did was to take the sexism out of it but say he was directionally correct. Do you think that he is? And if so, how would you suggest fixing it while also not reversing the progress that academia has made in terms of reducing the level of sexism that exists within it?
Another consideration here is that modern-day science is a very collaborative endeavor. I, like you, am in biomedical research (I just finished my PhD last year, in chem bio/med chem), so we both know how much being able to work with others matters in our world. Nobody can do biomedical research completely alone, and because of that, the ability to get along with colleagues, not create hostile/toxic working environments, being accommodating of those with different life situations/backgrounds, etc. are all extremely valuable in order to take advantage of all the talent in our world. Could it be that this, if true, is in some ways just academia selecting for what is more valuable in today's scientific environment, and thus isn't a bad thing at all? (I'm a "weird nerd" by your definition, albeit not nearly as successful of one, but I understand that just because something is against my interest doesn't mean it is against society's.)