The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

A metascience post of sorts that argues we should take human capital more seriously

A few weeks ago, a lot of people on academic X quickly forgot about their support for “Women in STEM” and got angry at, of all people, Katalin Karikó, the co-inventor of the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines and 2023 Nobel Prize winner. Her crime? A passage from her book where she laments that academia involved way too much people pleasing and political games. Reactions varied¹ from angry: “Who does she think she is”/”We are all Geniuses, not only her, we all deserve funding, why does she think she is special”/”Nooo, she is a jerk” to self-satisfied, cynical: “Well of course this is how it is, why are intelligent people so naive?”

The quote in question:

But I was learning that succeeding at a research institution like Penn required skills that had little to do with science. You needed the ability to sell yourself and your work. You needed to attract funding. You needed the kind of interpersonal savvy that got you invited to speak at conferences and made people eager to mentor and support you. You needed to know how to do things that I have never had any interest in (flattering people, schmoozing, being agreeable when you disagree, even when you are 100% certain you are correct). You needed to know how to climb the political ladder, to value a hierarchy that had always seemed, at best, wholly uninteresting (and, at worst, antithetical to good science.) I wasn’t interested in those kills. I did not want to play political games. Nor did I think I should have to.

A couple of months ago I wrote a piece called “The flight of the Weird Nerd from academia”, in which I argued there is a trend wherein Weird Nerds are being driven out of academia by the so-called Failed Corporatist phenotype. Katalin Karikó is a perfect example of a Weird Nerd. I recently argued that many Weird Nerds (I called them autistics, but people really hated that²), have found a refuge on the Internet, where their strengths are amplified and their weaknesses are less important. There, I make the case for why these people are uniquely suited for creative intellectual endeavours and why they might slip through the cracks in a lot of normal jobs. Judging from a (short) lifetime of personal observations as well as the vitriol launched at Karikó for daring to not be “normal”, I suspect some explicit pro-Weird Nerd norms have to exist in an institution that seeks to properly utilize these people, for the benefit of us all. To formalize this:

“Any system that is not explicitly pro-Weird Nerd will turn anti-Weird Nerd pretty quickly.”

That is because most people, while liking non-conformism in the abstract and post-facto, are not very willing to actually put up with the personality trade-offs of Weird Nerds in practice. There is an increasing number of people right now who are thinking about how to build better intellectual institutions (e.g. those who study metascience.) Yet surprisingly little attention is given to human capital outside of “Let’s increase immigration” (a good idea, don’t get me wrong.) But if the rule turns out to be true, I think it’s worth thinking about what kind of individuals one wants to attract in these institutions and how to keep them there. And I believe the conversation here starts with accepting a simple truth, which is that Weird Nerds will have certain traits that might be less than ideal, that these traits come “in a package” with other, very good traits, and if one makes filtering or promotion based on the absence of those traits a priority, they will miss out on the positives. It means really internalizing the existence of trade-offs in human personality, in an era where accepting trade-offs is deeply unfashionable, and structuring institutions and their cultures while keeping them in mind.

Genius is rare

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In one of her interviews, Katalin Karikó recalls her mother calling her from Hungary around the time when the Nobel Prizes were awarded and asking her if that year she was going to win it. The question, in its loving naivete, must have stung worse than an insult: not only was Karikó not close to this remarkable feat, she was actually unsuccessful by much less ambitious metrics. Put simply, she had left her family in Hungary to work in the US, but for little actual measurable reward, be it status or money. Karikó did not get grants. Karikó did not get tenure. What Karikó did was work until late at night on a topic people did not pay that much attention to at the time: mRNA for vaccines. And she did that for decades. Paul Graham talks about an underrated quality one needs for extreme success, namely the willingness to be low status. And Karikó had plenty of that: she lived her convictions, in this case the conviction in the importance of mRNA through rejections, humiliations (her office was vacated without her having received prior notice) and hardship. I would go even further and say: she had intellectual courage.

People often mistake a non-descript combination of conscientiousness coupled with high intelligence with Genius. By that definition, there is some decent amount of Genius in Science. Some people, like those getting mad at Karikó for that passage, go even further: Genius is so abundant in Science, that we can barely find our way through it: we are drowning in it! Of course, this is just a “feel-goodism” people like to tell themselves. Genius is very rare, in Science and outside of it, and it’s linked to intellectual courage, the quality Karikó had an abundance of. And it’s not only that Genius as a whole is rare in the population: it also usually shines in specific places. Karikó was a Genius at Biology and maybe at nothing else. For someone to be a Genius, many pieces have to fall into place: the right personality has to be there, the right happenings have to happen and so on. We should catalyze the right circumstances for Genius to manifest itself more, instead of diminishing them. In Kariko’s case, it seems like the unnecessarily political nature of Science and the fact that her specific workplace was not very Weird Nerd- friendly were obstacles. It’s good they did not stop her. But there are probably many 70%, or 80% or 95% Katalin Karikos who were not merely hampered, but stopped. And that’s probably a huge loss.

The bad parts are a feature, not a bug

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To have so much intellectual courage one has to be a bit mad. It’s hard to believe this needs to be said, but the no trade-off world many people like to pretend is real does not, in fact, exist. It’s reasonable to expect Weird Nerds or anyone else for that matter to be ethical and not become toxic colleagues. And listening to the interviews with Karikó one hardly gets the impression that she was toxic: there is a Jesus-like quality to the way she talks even about the people who had wronged her — for example about a Professor who threatened to have her deported. It’s hard to imagine that coming from a “jerk”, as many have called her. But it’s also hard to believe someone like her could ever become the most pleasant interlocutor at a dinner party, or the most socially adept and organized manager. And that is fine. We need her in the lab, not at fancy dinners.

Now, one could argue that Karikó and Weird Nerds should just learn to be strategic and suck it up, like most people do. I sensed quite a bit of schadenfreude from people suggesting we should be making people like her suffer through the same arduous processes as everyone else. Of course, if I was Katalin Karikó ’s friend, I would advise her to try and play the political game if that’s what’s needed. Maybe it would have been better for her in the moment. But it might be the case that if she did listen to such advice, she would have been so drained of energy that less time would have been spent pursuing her interests. Or she would have just switched research fields to work on something more popular.

Everything comes at a cost: spend more time worrying about politics, there will be less time for science. What’s more, the kind of people who really care about science or truth to the extent that Karikó did, are not the same people that get motivated by playing politics or being incredibly pleasant. There is a strong anti-correlation between these interests (that of course does not mean there is no one who is good at both.) Selecting future intellectuals based on traits like Agreeableness or Extraversion might not be only unnecessary, but actually harmful. We might be actively depleting the talent pool of the kind of people we do want to see in academic institutions.

Societal trends

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A full scientific career these days is a bit of a cacophony. It starts with doing a lot of what is essentially grunt work in a lab or on a computer. Slowly, one moves up the ladder and gains more independence. Postdoc is probably the stage that maps best to what people usually imagine when they think of a scientist: that’s when one is fully in charge of their projects, but also spends their day-to-day doing actual scientific work. Ironically, it’s also the most precarious: postdocs are often in their 30s, jumping between relatively short term contracts. The way out of this is to become a PI, or Principal Investigator. In 2011, the average age at which a biomedical scientist gets their first R01 grant to establish their independent career as a PI is 42, having increased from 36 in the 80s. It has probably increased since then. As a PI, interpersonal skills become more and more important: one has to forge collaborations, write and get grants, take care of the fragile mental health of confused PhD students so they can produce work and so on. The skills required to be a successful PhD student and postdoc are in many ways very different from those required to be a good PI, almost as if they were different careers.

Age at first R01 grant

It’s at this young PI stage that Karikó ’s career hit a wall: after she became an Adjunct Professor, she stopped advancing further. Some of it was because of the topic she had chosen and in this regard, diversifying funding and supporting more high risk projects are very good proposals coming from the metascience community that would have helped. But some of it was probably her personality, as she says herself. I suspect selection against Weird Nerds has actually amplified since Karikó ’s time in academia: everything from ever larger collaborations in Biology, to longer times to becoming independent or increase in admin points in that direction. Indeed, as I have argued before, there is some quantitative evidence there are less Weird Nerds in STEM academia than there used to be.

So far I have discussed the Hard Sciences, but there is a case to be made that the problem is much more acute in less quantifiable fields like Humanities or Social Sciences. STEM has a higher barrier to entry: there is only so much political game playing that one can do in order to advance themselves if one cannot perform experiments in a lab. It is also somewhat more clear if a scientific piece of work is completely bad. There is feedback from industry, with most start-ups in biotech these days coming out of academic labs: this provides a strong incentive for innovation. Such quality check mechanisms are on much more shaky ground in fields like Humanities, where feedback from society can happen on the order of decades. Arguably, being a Weird Nerd that is intrinsically driven by the truth as opposed to what’s fashionable is even more crucial in the absence of hard metrics that can tell one their work is wrong.

But backlash from society does eventually happen, and I think we are in the middle of this right now, with trust in academia plummeting in a bipartisan fashion, as recent Gallup polls show. At least some of the current crisis is, in my opinion, down to academia essentially selecting against Weird Nerds types. A problem with non-STEM topics might sound less problematic than a replication crisis in cancer biology. I think that’s not true: after all, we depend on a collective imaginarium for a healthy society, a collective imaginarium whose pillars might be slowly crumbling.

1. The most popular tweet in question, from @johnstreichner, has been deleted since then. In it, he was basically arguing that we have so much Genius in academia and we need a way to select from this abundance of Genius.

2. I still stand by my association of Weird Nerds with autism, but for some reason people really do not like to call Weird Nerds autistic.